Cyrillic keyboards and XP hell

[Jules Levin]

Dear colleagues,
This may be a problem for Microsoft, but in my experience one is 
liable to get a techie who doesn't even know that one can enable Russian.

I always managed to have the phonic keyboard in earlier versions of 
MW (not to mention earlier wordprocessing programs), but when I
attempted to install it in my Dell with XP it failed.  I continued to 
"use" the standard keyboard, but it was not really useful to me, since I am
used to typing fast, in English or Russian using the phonic.
Anyway, last week I wanted to find something on Russian google, so I 
tediously pecked in the word in Cyrillic and then pasted it into Russian
google.  It was successful.  I am mentioning this to show that one 
week ago I still had Cyrillic capability.
Today I discovered to my horror that my MW no longer allowed me to 
switch to Russian.  When I checked my Languages selections under
settings, Russian had been deleted--only English and Lithuanian remained.
So I added Russian, but when I clicked apply, I was told "Windows 
could not properly load the Russian keyboard layout".
I tried all sorts of ways to do it, but failed.
I checked in System32 and did find kbdru.dll and kbdru1.dll, as well 
as some file kbdru without an extension.
I also went back to Languages and as a test was able to add Italian 
with an Italian keyboard without any difficulties.

Has anyone else had this problem?  Any suggestions?
Jules Levin   

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