I installed DNS 11 Pro on a new computer and immediately upgraded it to 11.5. Creating the first user profile went fine and I can dictate normally. However, if I try to check the audio levels I am informed that "Check Microphone cannot find the sound system. Make sure your microphone is plugged in."

When creating new users, I get the same message, effectively barring me from completing the enrollment process for them. (Sort of. Today I can do the training for a new user created a couple of days ago because for some reason I no longer need to go through the mic check.)

I have sent a support request to Nuance, but my experience with them does not make me optimistic about getting a reply.

WHAT I HAVE DONE:

Restarted the computer

Tried different combinations of mic, USB pod and USB slot

Tried using the mic jack directly

Done a repair install of Ver. 11 (and now I am unable to upgrade to 11.5 because there are no "qualified" products on my computer, yet the upgrade manager nags me to upgrade every time I start Dragon)

Confirmed that WSR has no problem finding the mic

Confirmed sound quality directly through the Audio control panel

Disabled and enabled different combinations of audio input device

SPECS

Toshiba Portege 830 notebook

CPU: i7-2620/2.70 G

RAM: 8G

OS: Win7 x64 Ultimate (Japanese OS with English language pack on top)

Onboard sound card: Realtek High Definition Audio

Click KB 2012 REV D to Download a 30 Day Evaluation of KnowBrainer 2012
Click SpeechStart+ to Download a 15 Day Evaluation of SpeechStart+

I think I may have found a solution, no thanks to Nuance or its support desk. It comes from an anonymous post on another forum, and so far it works. The issue appears to be Dragon's inability to deal with Unicode characters when it retrieves soundcard names from the system. If you change the "system locale" (ie, language to use with non-Unicode programs) to English, non-alphanumeric characters in soundcard names are displayed as question marks, but as long as you can identify the soundcard you want, audio adjustment functions are restored and you can even create new profiles.

In my case, the underlying OS is Win 7 Japanese Ultimate with an English language pack on top. The language pack does not go so far, however, as translating audio device names, and DNS is unable to deal with the names a modern OS supplies. But make those names non-Unicode, and DNS is happy.

This comes at a cost. Changing settings may cause non-Unicode Japanese programs to fail or display their menus in gibberish, and that is a stupid and unreasonable tradeoff for any software vendor to force on its users.

To make the change, go to  Control Panel>Clock, Language and Region>Change location>Administrative>Change system locale and choose a flavor of English.

This is the second major Japanese-related glitch that I have encountered in DNS. The first is the long-documented, long-despised failure in the correction dialog if the system date format is set to Japanese. That error has been uncorrected for several major upgrades, so there's little hope the soundcard error is going to be acknowledged, let alone fixed, by Nuance any time soon. But this solution is marginally better than tearing your hair out.