It seems to me I heard somewhere that Dale Walker wrote in article
<1ll230h29v7djtijcvf7nc5r98fqsgh1ag@4ax.com>:

>On Mon, 16 Feb 2004 23:12:04 +0100, "Konrad Den Ende"
><chamsterkonrad@bigfoot.com> wrote:

>>> so what would be the difference between using a Japanese OS and using an
>>> English OS + Japanese MUI?
>You should look at
>http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/Muifaq.mspx#MUIques4

>It says that Western XP Pro + MUI has 97% of the functionality of the
>real thing. With a pure J-OS, all your menu's, help systems, dialog
>boxes, etc are all in Japanese. You still cannot mix say Swedish with
>Japanese. Never seen a real J-OS in anything other than Japanese mode
>but I would suggest if anything, the only other languages you might be
>able to use would be US English and maybe Chinese.

>The advantage of the MUI over the native Japanese version is that you
>can have say Swedish & Japanese on the same system. You may have to
>use different logins to get full functionality from both but at least
>you get most of the menus, dialog boxes and help in the respective
>languages.

>>Why not use English OS + Japanese IME?

>The MUI is appreciably better than English with the Japanese IME for
>those that regularly use two (or more languages) a lot or for those
>with say one user who can only use English and another that can only
>use Japanese.

>For those that just dabble in Japanese, the only real advantage the
>J-MUI has is the ability to automatically change system fonts with the
>login user. This means that keyboard layouts, etc can be kept separate
>(useful for those European/English speaking people with non US
>keyboards when they want to be in native mode, or those like me who
>hate the Japanese yen sign appearing everywhere there should be a
>backslash).

>There's also a little utility called applocale
>http://ftp.pu.edu.tw/cpatch/msupdate/applocale/apploc.msi
>which is a Microsoft utility that allows you to use a different system
>font within any current setup meaning you can run Japanese apps, with
>Japanese menus, dialog boxes and everything within any other setup.
>It's not perfect but for someone like me that only has a couple of
>apps that need the full Japanese system font, it allows me to do
>everything as the same login user using the western system font (with
>lovely backslashes instead of yen signs).

>I was hoping I could finally type Japanese directly into Forte Agent
>Newsreader but alas, Agent 1.93 is still broken in that respect. I'm
>on a 30 day trial of Agent 2.0 at the moment which comes tantalizingly
>close but hangs when trying to exit Agent :(
>Either Agent 2.0 is at fault or Applocale, I'm not sure. Either way,
>until it's fixed, it's still too much effort for me to be bothered to
>write anything in Japanese to a Usenet newsgroup. Haven't tried Agent
>2.0 with a Japanese system font yet. Will do so, after I've finished
>converting my home movies of my recent holiday from avi to mpg so that
>I can view it on my DVD player.

Dale, since your recent email I've played around a bit and have been
able to type Japanese into a box above Agent's composition window, but I
haven't found how to transfer it into the message area properly--I end
up with asterisks or questions marks (forgot which).  This was without
applocale, and Agent performed normally including exiting.  I'll
continue to mess around with.  There's gotta be a way.
-- 
Don
Old age is when you start saying "I wish I knew now what I knew then."