Cyrillic chars instead of Western European

[Draken]

Hi people of the sevenforums. I'm sorry for this being my first post but I'm having a problem that's been giving me an headache for about 4 days now. Well it seems that all of a sudden my computer started showing cyrillic chars (they seem to be russian) in place of letters with special chars like ç, or à, etc.
This problem is affecting a few programs like bsplayer, quicktime, subtitles, and Team Fortress 2. BSPlayer doesn't even start movies anymore but I don't know if it's related. I've already search on google a lot and did a bunch of things, like editing registry, cleaning it with a regcleaner, installing new MUI and switching between them, scanned with spybot, ESET Smart Security, MalwareBytes... one funny thing that happened to me when I was going to install it was that the part where you choose the installation language appeared in russian with russian selected by default. I also did a search on this site but I found nothing useful.
I've also tried reinstalling the fonts but it did nothing. I uninstalled some windows updates to see if that was the cause but, as expected, it didn't work.
One thing that made me curious was that in the subtitle options of MPC, if I choose ANSI instead of DEFAULT the subtitles show correctly.

Problem examples:
BSPlayer
Subtitles

The text is in Portuguese from Portugal btw.
Thanks of any help provided, if you want me to attach the images instead of putting links, ask.

 

[Pontii]

Hi, well allow your windows updater, after that download all the updates, and even after that, you can see in a list all the language you can download. Test that and see if that works

 

[Draken]

Thanks for the reply. Windows already has all updates installed. I tried installing the russian MUI and change everything to russian, then I rebooted as it was asked, then I switched again to the portuguese MUI but, as I expected, it didn't work... guess I'll have to format :/ What annoys me the most is not finding a solution to this problem anywhere.

 

[Thorsen]

In Regional Settings go to languages and then details and make sure the default is set to the one you want.

The default might be set wrong and is changing whenever a program runs and says use default language.

I am using XP at the moment so I cant list the exact way to get to the setting.

You can probably type in "Regional Settings" into the Start-Searchbar to get to the main screen then Languages should be one of the tabs or sections. and then look for an option to change the default language. Hope this helps

 

[Draken]

There has been some development in the last few hours. If I choose, for example, Hebrew (Israel) in the current language for non-Unicode programs, bsplayer stops showing those black bars and can play movies again, but the installer for MalwareBytes (the part where we choose the installation language) shows up all written in hebrew. If I set the Language for non-Unicode programs back to Portuguese the part where we choose the installation language appears in russian again and those black bars come back and bsplayer stops playing videos again. Right now I'm trying to delete russian related files from my computer.
Thanks for the reply thorsen btw

 

[Draken]

You can close or delete this. I ended up formatting my pc.

 

[pjmatos]

I found this post to be the closest related to my problem and, as it is finally solved, I'm posting here my findings, hoping to help anyone else with a similar problem.

The first thing I noticed when this problem started were the subtitles in WMP not showing the Portuguese characters with accents, which became replaced by some weird characters/symbols. When I tried to change the encoding from ANSI to UTF-8 of the subtitle file in Notepad++ or UltraEdit, it was strange that it couldn't maintain the correct characters.

The second thing was a menu of an application, where the Portuguese characters with accents become replaced with question marks.

Finally, when I opened text files in Notepad that have been working correctly before, these same characters were replaced with those same new strange characters. Quite unexpectedly, I could write characters with accents. But, when trying to save these files in the default ANSI encoding, a warning was issued:

This file contains characters in Unicode format which will be lost if you save this file as an ANSI encoded text file. To keep the Unicode information, click Cancel below and then select one of the Unicode options from the Encoding drop down list. Continue?

Everything in "Region and Language" settings was configured to Portuguese (Portugal). I tried to change "Current language for non-Unicode programs" to English and then back again to Portuguese, but with no results.

SOLUTION: Definitely it was a problem with this setting of the system locale, which "controls the language used when displaying text in programs that do not support Unicode".

I checked the registry to detect any suspicious values in the keys that I think are related to this setting:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\CodePage
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Nls\CodePage
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Control\Nls\CodePage
​

After a bit of luck I found something wrong in the last 2: the value name "1252" (Western Europe) was with the value data "C_1256.NLS" (Arabic).

Changing both to "C_1252.NLS" solved the problem.

After a quick research I found that the software UST-Pro 2 installation was the guilty for this stupid change in the registry.