Sorry to revive this old thread but I have exactly the same problem with my HD5. I could avoid applocale but SS won't display japanese without applocale. Anyone have any idea why JP SonicStage won't display tracktitles when running on "non-unicode language = Japanese"? I prefer avoiding applocale alltogether (too much JP software) but SS won't let me oh btw, when using applocale some questionmarks remain; like those "display by" buttons on the left. Maybe I'm missing some fonts?? Thanks in advance! ~Thomas ps. I'm running JP SonicStage 3.4 on US XP SP2, Vaio TR3AP3