Cheers guthmund, unfortunately it's still a mystery! Time zone is in Australia, the regional and language settings in the Control Panel are all English and English-related, the IE Language options have US English listed as the only allowed language, and the Windows Update site has the 'English (recommended)' radio button marked already, so it's not giving me Japanese because of that. Basically there's no mention of Japan or Japanese anywhere in the whole computer! It's not a Japanese version of Windows, of course.
But hey, it's not a big deal since I can just change it to English in the address bar, but I suppose this'll by a mystery for the ages
