Now, I also installed a plain vanilla (no "international" fonts, no "Russian"
fonts, no nothing installed on top) Spanish MCP2 system from 2001 for further
testing -- lSwitcher 2.92 (which didn't do the settings font switch) displays
its Russian notebook just fine on that with the default font (System
Proportional IIRC). I tried all the fonts that pop up in the font palette by
default (Tms Rmn, Courier, Helv) and the Russian notebook displays just fine,
letting aside the clipping at 640�480. I am not a specialist in Czech or
Polish, but they look readable to me as well, and certainly there are no
squares nor "house" characters.
Just see the lSw292@MCP2 screenshots series.

Case in point: I have an older Spanish work system where naturally
Spanish non-ASCII characters are displayed correctly all the time. I
expect this may not be the case for the Global tab (CP1207),

The only reason this wouldn't work is if the system predates the use
of uconv.dll or if it doesn't have the Warp Sans and/or Helv fonts
installed. None of which is likely.

Actually, I was right,

and I can show you on the test MCP2/es system again.
The only thing that did not render properly in 2.92 in it, was the "Global"
page with the multi-language drop-down: not even "Espa�ol", whereas the other
pages do Spanish, Russian, etc. flawlessly. The good news is that page is
already fixed in 2.93 without using the Times New Roman, either. Have a look
at the "Unicode_" pair of screenshots.