I have to be fair that while the layout is different, LM is faster than trusty old OE, so I accept the reason for the upgrade. But it’s sloppy that I’m forced to use an Amercian dictionary in an international release product.

I know from doing some investigations (which is where i found this post) that I can muck about with ini files to fix it, but I really shouldn’t have to be hacking about in notepad in this day and age for such a simple but necesary user customisation.

We’re well aware of the pain for others to have to use US dictionaries only. We’ll be adding more dictionaries, including UK English, before Windows Live Writer exits beta–though we’ll still be far from catching up with Word (and there are internal reasons why we cannot currently use their proofing technology).

I’m not sure what you mean about the user dictionary being stored on a per-machine basis, or being virtualized. We store them in roaming appdata. The only thing that should be stored in local appdata is log files and cached versions of downloaded resources. For example, on my Vista machine the user dictionary file is here:

C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Windows Live Writer\Dictionaries\userdic.tlx

What are you seeing in the virtualized program directory? We should never be storing anything there. I see one file in mine, dbpconfig.xml, but it’s being written by a third-party Writer plug-in (the one for inserting del.icio.us bookmarks).

Thanks!