Windows 2003 always reverts to US English language for RDP Sessions

[AaronPower]

I have a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with Terminal Services enabled. I set the language option to "English (Australian)", and the locale to "Australia" during the original Install, and made sure that these changes were applied to the default user profile.

When a pristine user account logs into the local console, then the user will inherit the default user profile and see only the English (Aust) language. Spelling checker works correctly, and there is no option for a language selection (since there is only one language).

This user can log on and off from the local console, and all settings are retained.

However, as soon as this user logs in through an RDP session, the English (US) language is added to the profile, and is set to be the defualt. You can manually go through the control panel and set English (Aust) back to be the default, but you have to do this on every subsequent RDP login.

At this stage I am using a Windows 2000 SP4 Professional client (running version 5.1 of the MS RDP Client), but once the server goes into final production it will use a combination of Windows XP SP1 and Wyse thin clients. The behaviour may be different with those clients, but I won't be able to test that until it goes in at the client site - and that is not the time I want to be admitting that I can't set the language options correctly.

Any thoughts appreciated.
Aaron Power.

 

[TimRegester]

Guess what you are not alone see my thread 931-786570 it seems this issue scans the globe.

At least you may have pinpointed where the issue lies in terms of common factors.

Did you find a fix?

 

[AaronPower]

Actually I did end up working out a solution to this. Meant to post my own reply, so answer would be attached to the question, but never got around to it

The end result is somewhat counter intuitive, and I am not sure it is going to suit you exactly, but here goes...

The basic idea is that you need to set the Region to your desired area, but leave the language set to Engish (US). For me this means that when I open the "Region and Language Options" applet from Control Panel I need to set the following:-

On the "Regional Options" tab, set the "Standards and formats" to English (Aust) and set the "Location" to Australia.

On the "Languages" tab, leave the "Supplemental Language Support" un-ticked, then in the "Details" section...

On the "Settings" tab, have the only installed language as English (US).

Back in the main "Region and Language Options" applet, I can't recall what I set the non-unicode language option to on the "Advanced" tab, but it shouldn't make too much difference in the initial testing phase.

My understanding of the "logic" behind this, is that you are configuring the OS to use English (US) for its own internal processes, and then you set the localisation for any applications running to your local region.

This works fine for Australia, as we use a standard US keyboard, but I am not sure how it is going to work for a UK based system. You will definitely want to use a "puond" symbol rather than a "dollar" sign, and what ever other difference there are in your local keyboard. Likewise, any Eurpoean systems that want access to accented characters may have trouble with this solution.

I believe that this "logic" only comes into play when you access the server through RDP / ICA sessions. It works differently when you work locally. Also, it does have some way of checking the language settings on the RDP / ICA client, so make sure that however you configure your server, all you clients are configured the same.

I eventually worked this out from information contained in various other psots on lots of different forums, so I would like to thank all those that posters, but I can't remember any of you by name

 

[TimRegester]

Thanks for your reply, it opens a new train of thought.