Speech Recognition Is NOT Working

I have used speech recognition on my computer before, with a minor issue of it giving me grief over specific words. I haven't run it in a while and discovered it wasn't working right tonight. I thought it was my microphone, and sure enough when I unplugged the mic and ran the tutorial it was back to it's old self.

Until I tried to run it in wordpad. I spent no less than ten minutes trying to dictated the words "she lifted"! Even when I finally got the right correction it wouldn't accept the numbers. I tried saying "spell it" but no, I had to manually click on it before it would open the spell it tab. Then it wouldn't correctly spell it either so I said forget it and had to type the thing myself! I couldn't even get 2 words in after typing it myself before it had to correct again. Fifty or more times I tried saying "the lid" and NEVER got the proper words out of the corrector.

At this point I am extremely frustrated and angry and I will admit freely I descended into swearing at the speech recognition while attempting to close the piece of crap. Needless to say, now I don't even feel like writing.

And let's not even mention the lag! It would sit and think, and think, and think some more before finally ever accepting a word. Yet the infernal program had run perfect during the tutorial.

Now tell me what the ever loving point is to this program if it only works in the stinking tutorial? In trying to save my carpal tunnel from a great deal of typing I only ended up screaming in frustration at the computer and making my throat raw. Gee, thanks!

The point to all this is this. Is there some sort of update I missed for this piece of junk or am I stuck with yet another non working hunk of microsoft uselessness?

Is a 64 bit with 4 Gig of Ram.