We have group policy in place that has the following settings:
User Configuration -> Preferences ->Control Panel Settings ->Regional Options ->Regional Options ->English (Canada)
This policy sets the user regional settings to English (Canada). It works on Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows 7. For Windows Server 2008 (R1) SP2 it results in system almost unusable (specifically, most .vbs scripts fail with error 80004005) and the root cause is regional settings are applied incorrectly. The following registry value is set incorrectly:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International]
"Locale"="00004105"
It should be set to "00001009" (it should be hex, not decimal!).
If I open Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options the value of Current format is shown as "Arabic (Saudi Arabia)" (I guess because it is first in the list).
We also have similiar Group Policy with French (Canada) with the same effect (decimal instead of hex).
The systems are updated with all current updates. I tried to apply hotfix 974266 manually with no effect.