Chinese charactors replace western letters

I am an English guy living in china.

I am running Win98 (Chinese Edition). For some reason, every now and again, I will get an email from friends, in which some of the letters have been replaced by the equivalent Chinese character (my friends are using the standard English version of Windows). For example if someone writes "how are you?" I might get "How are 有?" (if you can't see that, I mean that I get the Chinese character for the word "you".)

This hasn't been a problem up until now, but I recent got a piece of software to help me learn Chinese and I find that almost all of the western letters are transformed into their Chinese counterparts. I have tried the software on a non-Chinese PC before I came out here and it should display the western letters, not Chinese characters.

Can anyone give me any advice as to whether this problem has a solution, or whether I will just have to bin this bit of software?

Thanks

LB

 

So I take it that no one has a clue what I am talking about, or how to solve this issue?