It might also appear that Vista is coming up in Spanish, since many English speakers might not recognize that is Portuguese.
Although the HP 2730p was supposed to ship with Vista Business preinstalled, mine actually came with XP Tablet edition instead. It might be that I was one of the earlier customers to get the Gobi mobile chipset for accessing Verizon, who knows.
Anyway, I used an external DVD drive to install Vista. Imagine my surprise when it didn't come up on English; I certainly didn't choose anything other than English, and California is not in the same Timezone as Brazil. Apparently the DVD for the Americas comes with English, Spanish, French and Portuguese; I suspect when it gets it wrong, it takes the first one in alphabetical order, which would be "BR-PT" (Brazilian Portugese)
Anyway, long story short, don't waste your time with Control Panel, language packs and "LIP" files.
Just re-install, this time you'll be starting FROM Vista.
You see, since I was using a non-HP DVD drive, I started the Vista install from an XP Tablet cmd window, instead of booting from the DVD. I believe it was this initial state that messed up the install, since as far as I can tell it's the ONLY difference between the failed and sucessful installs.
And if I were to try it again, from an XP system, I'd certainly try booting from the external DVD.
To HP's credit, their tech support person did try to help, and worked with me on the phone for quite some time, though they had no record of this, and agreed that it should have dome with Vista installed anyway. Ultimately it was me just trying the re-install, and they were off the phone at that point, so I don't have any way to update them on the fix.
A very nice laptop / tablet / convertible btw.
