I have recently clean-installed to Windows 7. Previously, on Windows Vista, I was easily able to see anything Japanese. On Windows 7 I can type in Japanese, and I haven't had trouble loading Japanese characters on websites like Tae Kim. My computer can also type in Japanese since, being a newer Windows OS, it just needs to be activated.

Therefore I believe I've isolated the problem to some sort of codec I am missing that relates to Skype. I have no idea, but I've tried Google to solve this issue and am having serious issues. Whenever I do see Japanese or Chinese on Skype, it just becomes a bunch of blank squares.

I'll try almost anything at this point, since it's a bit frustrating not knowing what I am missing. Hopefully somebody can help. Thanks.

That's really strange. The only thing I could think of is to try re-installing Skype. I actually installed Skype in Japanese, so maybe you could try that to force it into loading the Asian language pack. (You can change it back to English later - the only thing that's stuck in Japanese for me is the opening screen says "loading" in katakana whenever I open it.)

Download is the first link in blue in the green box here:

http://www.skype.com/intl/ja/download/sk...wnloading/

or you can choose a different language from the drop-down box at the bottom left corner of the page.

Well I think I'm missing some sort of codec. When I can select what language to change to, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese all have blank boxes next to them, instead of their proper characters. I'm incredibly perplexed as to why.

Codecs are plugins that allow proper decompression (and maybe compression) of audio and video streams. I don't think this has anything to do with codecs. My only guess is that maybe you got a version of Skype compiled for Windows XP or something, which isn't compatible with the language packs available in Windows 7.

Do you get the right number of blank squares for the Japanese characters you ought to see? (try pasting some known text into skype). If you do, then chances are this is a font issue (maybe Skype is misconfigured to use a font with no CJK support, or it can't find the CJK font it wants to use?) If you see the wrong number of blank squares (unlikely) it might be a character encoding issue. My guess is it's something font related, though.

I have no idea what happened but now it's fine. Everything except Korean, but I don't need that for my purposes. I didn't do anything and it just fixes itself. Sometimes things just work out, I suppose. Thanks for trying to help, everyone.

It could be a font issue.
Skype might be using its own font.

If possible, try to look in the Skype Settings.
Make sure you are using a Unicode font (such as UTF-8, Arial Unicode MS, etc).

Sometimes application used their own Western font and so they don't display Chinese/Japanese/Korean properly.

This same problem happened to me in VLC. VLC has its own font settings and I had to change the font to UTF-8.