Chinese Characters showing In Internet Explorer Search Bar

This is a very strange one. A couple of users recieved chinese characters in their windows explorers search bar. It was as if the language within that section of code had been changed to chinese/japanese.



I could find no detail on this issue anywhere but resolved it by changing the following registry key for the impacted users



HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main "Use Search Asst"

Set to "Yes" Made the characters english

Set to "No" Made the charactes chinese



this value was not set in the registry for other users so im not sure how these users populated the key with the odd value. Once corrected for this couple of users the problem disappeared.