I know there have been various guides to help people write chinese in game but as far as Iv'e seen these have all been for windows XP. I have windows vista and I think thats why none of the solutions posted work for me. Im sure there are other with vista out there, have you found a way to fix the problem?

It should be the same, set your uni-code language to Chinese and turn on the Chinese IME or download one like the Google IME (which I use).

Not sure about vista, but on XP the setting referred to is under the 'Regional and Language options' in control panel.. 'Advanced' tab.. 'Language for non-Unicode programs'. Make sure that is set to Chinese (PRC).
Note: Changing this setting will require a reboot.

The standard Microsoft windows IME sucks - especially at high res. Google IME at least will be in English as opposed to Sogou (where all the options etc are in Chinese, but I prefer it as an IME)

- go to Control Panel;
- click on Clock, Language and Region;
- click on Regional and Language Options;
- click on the Administrative tab;
- press the "Change System Locale ..." button;
- hit OK or enter Administrator credentials, when prompted;
- the drop-down list of available Locale options appears.
- choose the appropriate Locale eg Chinese (PRC), Chinese (Taiwan) etc.
- hit OK. The system will need to reboot, for the change to take effect.

Dont't forget to add a new keyboard language(eg. windows Chinese IME, google pinyin IME)
- hit the Keyboards and Languages tab, and then hit Change keyboards.
- Under Installed services, click Add.
- select the Specific Chinese language you want to add

I personnaly recommend you Google Pinyin. It's the program made by google, it's all in chinese install/options etc but his integration inside the programs is much better I find, and the best thing is you can setup a key other than SHIFT to swtich between chinese and english input, was quiet a problem for me before I used google pinyin caus many of my game keybindings require SHIFT as a modifier and sometimes weird things woud occur, like keys not responding, stuff like that.

BTW if you could change the Title of the topic as :
How to activate Chinese input under VISTA(Solved)
it might prove useful for other people in the futur. I remember I had big troubles to find how to activate it when I came from xp to vista

Ah yes.. a little different in Vista I see

As for the key bindings - yes, the common default language changing toggle is highly annoying - especially when you are used to a myriad of hotkeys for various applications. I ended up chooing a really awkward combination that barely any app will use or ALT+Shift+1 for English, ALT+Shift+2 for Chinese and removed all the other IME toggling hotkeys.

As a side note if some software or drivers are trying to install in Chinese, this is probably because you have the system locale or non-Unicode set to Chinese.

If you reset that to English before you install universal software or drivers, they should install in English. Afterwards you can change back to Chinese again. I have found that most drivers (nVidia, HP printers etc) all use this setting to determine what language they should use for setup. Perhaps this is Why Bolomas found GoogleIME to be Chinese. When I tried the Google IME it installed in English.

A yeah Lore now you're saying that I just realize why you were saying that googleIME was in english when I couldn't find an english installer lol.
Sometimes it's good to disable the chinese local when installing some programs; for a short story :

Recently I switched back to windows xp french edition. When installing the OS I already installed the windows chinese IME and set the locale for chinese language. later I wanted to install the sp3 patch but each time it would fail at the same place, watched many thread on the web but none would offer a solution to my problem. Later I tried to install photoshop french edition and the install would also fail because instead of creating a folder with the french characters éàèê it would create a chinese symbol. So once I desactivated the chinese locale I could install photoshop AND my service pack 3 ^^
But so far I never had such kind of problem with an english os, just happens with languages using accent characters like french or spanish.

Yeah.. it seems crazy that (on XP at least) most software installers look at the 'non-Unicode' setting to determine installation language - instead of looking at your 'location' or even the OS's own installation language.

Quite annoying to have all those extra reboots before and after software installations sometimes.