What is the User Locale?
The user locale, implemented in Windows 9x, Windows NT 4.x, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, is a per-user setting that determines the formats used by default to display dates, times, currency, and numbers, and the sorting order of text. A user locale is specified for each and every account created on a computer. Although available user locales are often listed as a language (sometimes in combination with a country), a user locale is NOT a language setting, and has nothing to do with input languages, keyboard layouts, codepages or user interface languages. The Hebrew user locale, for example, only contains data related to the standard regional settings of Israel, not to the Hebrew language. Note, however, that changing the user locale will change the language used to display the names of days and months. If the long date format is used to display “November 25, 1998,” the language used in the “November” string is dependent on the selected user locale. Changing the user locale has an immedi
