Robbie Mosaic's Web Log

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Decheng (Robbie) Fan 2011-02-27

In recent days I often find cpsio.exe and cppath.exe doesn’t work correctly with Chinese file names on Windows Vista. I’m quite sure that my system’s default locale is CP936 (Chinese Simplified (PRC)). I’ve verified this using the GetACP() and GetOEMCP() APIs. However I’m quite confused why when I use cpsio.exe to copy a string of Chinese text, I can paste it correctly if I use cpsio.exe itself, but not when I use either Word or GVim. In addtion, I found that if I use Word or GVim, the pasted text is actually a CP1252 (Western European, or latin1, or ISO-8859-1) interpretation of the CP936 encoded data: if I type “:set enc=cp1252” in gvim and then paste the text, and then switch to CP936 by typing “:set enc=cp936”, then the text is shown correctly. Apparrently it won’t work correctly if I paste it directly as CP936, because there will be a extraneous CP1252 to CP936 conversion done by Windows, and resulting in strange characters.

Yesterday I suddenly found that my administrator account can do the copying and pasting correctly using cppath.exe. Then I wondered why. I tried many different options, including the current regional format setting, location setting and “copy to system accounts” setting, also the “system default locale”. But all with no luck. Half given up, I suddenly recalled one fact: I created the user accounts through the “net user” command. But my administrator account was created in Control Panel through “User Accounts”. Then I thought may this be the reason why there is such a bug? And then I tried. Yes it worked! Finally I am happy to claim that the problem is solved — maybe there was some settings missing when I create the user account using “net user”.

I didn’t spend time to dig in to find out what registry settings are missing.  Anyway this makes me aware that “net user” command has its limitation (or bug?). For the root cause, I may want to investigate later.