Straggle between blogging software giants

Hello all.
Today I want to get back to my previous post about blogging software and blogging services. I have promised that soon I'll announce who has won (IMHO) in this battle for users. As you remember (if you don't you can recollect here) I was talking about 3 competitors: BlogJet, Windows Live Writer and www.writely.com (Google's service). I don't know how I forgot about Microsoft Word 2007 :). Microsoft has added an ability to blog directly from Word. Honestly saying I like it pretty much.
Well, who is the winner? I guess it is Windows Live Writer!!! You will ask why. Because it is FREE, easy to use and convenient. It is a standalone application thus we don't need to go to the web and be tied to the Internet connection speed. In spite of the speed of www.writely.com and my Internet connection I still didn't used to use it as a text processor. Who knows? Maybe sooner or later things will change but for now my decision is Windows Live writer.
But! But one thing has disappointed me. Recently Microsoft released an updated version of Windows Live Writer and said that support of Blogger Beta has been added. That made me excited ... but not for long :(. I have downloaded an updated version, installed it and discovered that it is not completely true. First, I had to get my BlogId number to be able to work with my blog. For me it was not a hard task.

For example JCHeng in his blog post "Blogger Beta Workaround" says that you should navigate in browser to your blog, view source and find blogID string.

That's easy. But you can also do it in other way. Just navigate to your blog and move your cursor to "New Post" link and in the status bar you will see the link url which has your blogID at the end. So you simply copy that link (right click an url and select 'copy' command from the context menu) and then insert it wherever you need and remove everything unnecessary. That's all! Second, I had to change the beginning of the string (url) from "http://www.blogger.com" to "http://beta.blogger.com". Ok, a piece of cake. But all these movement didn't help :(. I continued reciving errors.
Fortunately one of the visitors of JCHeng's blog left a very useful comment. He gave a link to another workaround which fixed an issue. The problem was in the regional settings. If you want Windows Live Writer to work correctly you should change the regional settings to English (United States). Thanks SiD. This method works but it is not acceptable for me. Therefore all I have to do is wait when another new version of Windows Live Writer will be released. Hope it won't take long!