XnView Software

That it only breaks file access for some programs, but others work fine, suggests it is a problem of the broken programs. The most likely cause is that those broken programs use a system call to access the file system that doesn't respect unicode. AFAIK Windows offers versions with respect to ...

I am running XnView 1.97 on Windows XP, german locale wth support for complex characters and east asian languages enabled.

If i try to open a file with a name containing japanese characters from the explorer, i get an error message about an "error while opening file ..." with all japanese ...