Another ambiguous problem – Network Service (SYSYTEM Account) locale...

Recently one of our customers decided he want another application server for his farm. He already have several of those based on W2k3 but we could not just clone it since the hardware platform was "a little" different from the rest of his machines. So we have installed it and configured it basically the same way as the previous ones and have installed client’s ASP.NET application on it. Everything was all right, well, almost everything… We live in Poland so the client wanted to have Polish localization on his server. That’s of course not a problem. But he also wanted the SYSTEM account, particularly Network Service profile to also run in Polish since his application could not manage to successfully perform searches etc. when there were our neat special Polish language characters in user input. So we have changed it in Control Panel|Regional and Language Options in this dialog:



We took care to change everything to Polish on the next to tabs:



What could be easier? Then we also checked the Apply all settings to current user account and to default user profile since we needed this for Network Service profile specifically. The dialog that W2k3 shows when you check this box explains everything:



So we restarted the whole machine and then happy and satisfied with our prompt service we notified customer about successful completion of his order.

But he was not satisfied at all since that did not changed anything… Don’t ask why - I do not know. We have four another machines where there were no problems with this settings, everything including Windows dialogs suggested that it should work but the customer were right - it didn’t. So we started to search and eventually found the LWA solution. We have located the place where W2k3 stores locale information for the SYSTEM profiles (System profile (S-1-5-18), Network Service profile (S-1-5-20), Local Service profile (S-1-5-19)) which is of course here - [HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-XX\Control Panel\International] and check for the differences between machines who worked all right and the one who did not. There were differences so we have just copy this information over from the good one. We also have copied the [HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-19\Control Panel\International\Geo] just to be sure. And voila! - after the restart it works. Why it did not changed the Microsoft interface way? As I mentioned before I don’t know. Well, solution worked :-).