A few weeks ago I logged into this blog as normal. Imagine my surprise to find that all my menus had shifted into German, a language I cannot read. Still stranger, my other PC continued to get the menus in English.

What is going on here?

Some ideas:

1. I live in Switzerland and usually connect from there. Was Live making a language guess based on my IP address location? But then both machines should get the same result shouldn't they?
2. Some hidden cookie in the browser? Deleted all of them, but not effect.
3. Page elements stuck in the cache? Deleted the cache contents, but no effect.
4. Something weird in Windows settings (I'm using Vista)? Well both PCs are set much the same. This one (with the error) is set for English with a US keyboard. The other (normal) is set for English with Swiss-German keyboard. If the error was the other way around this could be an explanation, but the reverse is true. The machine with a US keyboard gets the German menus.
5. Something strange in the HTTP headers? With help from a friend, I used the browser to hit a site that shows all the hidden stuff in each request. Both machines have identical Agent strings.
6. Something specific to IE7? So I tried using Opera instead. Going to Live Spaces I get English menus. Ahah! So I proceed to log in with my credentials, and BANG I'm back into German again.
7. So it must be something attached to my Passport account? But my other computer STILL shows English with the same credentials!!!

Aaaarrrgggghhh!!!!!

So the cause is a total mystery to me, and I'm not exactly ignorant on how websites and browsers work.

But the final point of this saga is that Live Spaces offers me NO WAY to change whatever it is that it thinks my language should be, nor does it provide any hints on how to fix this. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any way to get technical support on Spaces at all.

Grrrrrrr!!!!