I'm experiencing the exact same problem.. after installing VLC (version 0.9.7)on XP SP3 US version , first time I run VLC will
use the langauge preference set in the system's regional setting. In my case it's Traditional Chinese, when I tried
to change the language preference to american english, the preference menu will have english and chinese mixed
in with no way to fix.
if I tried to delete and VLC setting, it'll just put VLC back into the default mode and recreate the setting according
to regional setting.
So far the ONLY way to avoid this is by setting the system regional setting temporarily to english and then install VLC
(or delete VLC's preference data and restart VLC).
Try the following:
1. Close VLC
2. Delete VLC setting folder (%appdata%\vlc)
3. Start VLC with "--language=en" parameter
It works fine for me (VLC 0.9.4 + Windows XP SP3).