Major Problems with Kingsoft Powerword 2007 and Windows 7

[weregoingunion]

Hi, I just bought a new computer and installed the Windows Ultimate edition because it seemed to be the best for handling English and Chinese.

I installed the MUI for Chinese and I'm not quite sure what it is doing at this point. The computer already embedded Chinese characters into Google Chrome just fine without installing this. But when installing Powerword (it did this on XP too) it gave me a bunch of scrambled ASCII characters but I just clicked Next to go through the whole process.

It installed just fine and I switched the settings to English and went to User-defined dictionary in order to add the CEDICT that ABCinChina posted on here awhile back. I have had no problems getting this to work on XP. But while trying to add it this time, it not only had a ton of scrambled ASCII characters (see attached picture) (the rest of the characters in the program read just fine) but it also kept telling me that there was a duplicate and the entry could not be added. I have no idea what it thought was a duplicate because as I said the entries were scrambled.

After clicking "Ignore" or "Skip" or whatever every 10 seconds and about 200 times I finally went to Windows Task Manager and killed the process. I tried to re-open the program and Windows would not let me. It said it shut down improperly and flat-out would not open. So I uninstalled and reinstalled the program. This time I went to change to English and it gave me an error which I'm not sure I understand (see attached picture). Uninstalled/reinstalled and SAME error.

I again went to the User-defined Dictionary and tried to add - same problem with duplicates and scrambled characters. I had to kill the process again but this time it opened back up just fine.

Now I'm at a stopping point because Windows 7 is already driving me absolutely crazy. Any advice on how to correctly install Powerword would be appreciated or advice on using Windows 7 with Chinese (not the computer settings, just having it properly read everything) would be great.

I also installed Stardict and copied all of my dictionaries over in .tar format. I used 7zip to extract them but NOTHING appears in the folder. When I tried to extract them again, it asks me if I want to write over them but they are not visible! I can't find anything about hidden files in Windows 7 and I'm not sure why these would be hidden anyway.

So please view the attached screenshots and tell me what you think. If you haven't switched to Windows 7 yet, be prepared for a lot of work...

[Y_tony]

I haven't used Windows 7 before. well. i guess if you change the language of computer into Chinese. there should not be problem. and you can change it to English again after the installation of Powerword. OR , you could try again with a newer version of Powerword. i suppose the 2007 version is too out of date for Windows 7.

but i think the best way is to change your operating system to Windows XP.

[weregoingunion]

I have solved my own problem by going to Control Panel -> Change Keyboards -> Administrative -> Change System Locale. I changed "Current Language for Non-Unicode Programs" to Chinese Simplified (PRC).

I blew right past that earlier without reading it! I guess this is basically the same thing you would do on Windows XP.

BUT, I am now left with a bunch of scrambled text for Kingsoft Powerword in my start menu. Not a big deal but if someone would quick type out (in English or Chinese) what it would look like if I hadn't installed first without change the non-unicode option. (Screenshot attached...)

I have yet to figure out where my Stardict files extracted to. I'd like to figure it out but if worse comes to worst, I'll extract them on another computer and move them over. ;)

Sorry for a pointless thread of talking at myself but I hope this can help someone else eventually.