The webpage of Stoyan Varlyakov

Recently I came across an interesting problem.

I have on my work “hate-this-slow-POS” laptop every other Microsoft product out there. This includes proof-typing on 3 Languages and there is an interesting side effect.

After windows update jumps in and installs whatever it does, I end up with a very large option of languages to choose from. These include Korean, Japanese, and TWO types Chinese. I wish I was fluent in any of those, but I am not. So I ended up looking for a solution.
I came across a number of posts from angry people that they have not configured any of those in their settings, so pretty much the language settings tab looks like this:

But when you switch your language with your favorite key combo (Cntrl+Shift or Alt+Shift), then you end up clicking a lot more to cycle through this large list:

Q: Why the H… is this happening to me?

A: Some smart MS guy decided to embed the integration of Asian languages into the startup process. That’s right – in the registry. No check is done if my computer actually uses the exotic languages, nor am I asked “do you want to install whatever-this-is?”.

Q: So how can I remove them?

A: I found the answer on a official Microsoft partner forum. I am unaware who is the original source to give credit for this finding, but here is how you can do that the easy way.

1. Download this file and execute the .reg from this .zip remoteExtraLang

2. Reboot.

3. Done.

This is a zip file which contains 2 files.

removeExtraLang.reg – just execute that (ignore all warning that this will harm your PC bla bla)

removeExtraLang.txt – this is the same file, in plain text.

Here is what the file does:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
“IME14 KOR Setup”=-
“IME14 JPN Setup”=-
“IME14 CHS Setup”=-
“IME14 CHT Setup”=-

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
“IME14 KOR Setup”=-
“IME14 JPN Setup”=-
“IME14 CHS Setup”=-
“IME14 CHT Setup”=-

It just finds the extra entries done by Windows Update (thanks again!) and removes them.

You could manually look in the registry and remove the entries yourself, but I am a lazy person and since this issue might reoccur, I just keep a copy of the reg file.