Thanks Hilmar, but I just

set collate to "machine"

instead of "pinyin", and the system worked again. The funny thing is that the system had been working for years in China without any problem, but that just now, since they changed systems, did the problem arise in all it's glory. Is it a Windows 7 issue? I have no idea.

It's exactly as Dragan said. It pops up where you least expect it. Specifically Rushmore seems to be disabled.

Good to know.


>>>Not the keyboard drivers, but the collate sequence. When a sequence other than machine is in effect, string comparisons comply with the rules set in the sequence. I've seen some really unexpected results in such cases - it may affect your seek()s and whatnot.
>>
>>Well now I've seen those too :)
>>
>>Thank you very much!
>
>You may want to try the "==" operator for exact comparisons. I am not sure, though, whether it has the same ... "feature", in the case of different collation sequences.