In a fit of passionate prose, I accidentally forgot which thread I was in, and posted a rather lengthy comment in BS: Non-ASCII Character Wanted that's probably even more applicable here.

I won't repeat the whole posting, but the punchline was:

People considering "keeping up" with things, may want to plan on an operating system (as well as hardware) upgrade sometime in the future, because:

WINDOWS 2OOO PROFESSIONAL (OR BETTER) AND WINDOWS XP PROFESSIONAL (OR BETTER) ARE THE ONLY EXISTING MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEMS CAPABLE OF FULLY "HANDLING" DOUBLE-BYTE CHARACTER SETS.

The "or better" above is to include "Server" and "Enterprise" versions of those two operating systems.

Double-byte character sets means full Unicode.

John