Wacom Intuos4 issues remain unresolved

Dear Mr. Masahiko Yamada!

We, the undersigned Wacom users, are utterly sad to see how the brand you lead, whose name alone has become the common name for digital tablet technology among designers and painters worldwide, is failing to justify our confidence and is nothing less than ignoring users' complaints about obvious Intuos4 driver and design flaws, thus ruining Wacom's reputation in the eyes of more and more users.

In the forums (forum.wacom.eu), we have been trying during several months to draw technical support's attention to a critical bug in the driver v.6.12-5 which effectively prevents the tablet from working properly on windows 7 systems with system locale set to some other than default English - mostly to Russian or Ukraine ones (judging by forum posts). In short, the driver begins to crash on every Windows boot if default settings are changed by user - button mappings, pressure sensitivity and other crucial options.

Tablet functionality can only be gained back by deleting user preferences file (many people would configure the tablet to fit their workflow and spend quite a long time doing it, which is wasted everytime they loose their custom settings) - and just until the next boot. The only solution Wacom support suggests is rolling back to driver version 6.11, which is morally old and full of bugs itself. OR, their other advise is to change the system locale to English. Which also is not an acceptable option, because in this case localized non-unicode programs display unreadable characters, folders whose names contain local symbols cease to be opened by such programs, and so on.

Also we tried to urge Wacom to post a warning on the driver download page, to keep people informed so that they wouldn't risk to have their deadlines failed due to driver error - to absolutely no avail.

That was pretty annoying, but we were expecting the next driver version to be free of this bug. The more so because Wacom team had finally recognised the bug, quote:

"by Wacom on Mon 7. Dec 2009, 14:53
Wacom has tested the 6.12-5 drivers on Russian and Ukrainian systems and has seen some problems under Win7. The reason is unclear yet. - I would try to use driver verion 6.11 for the moment."

And then, the recently released driver v6.13-5 STILL has the non-default locale bug. What do we consider that? Developers' absent-mindedness? Or deliberate ignoring of all users with non-latin symbols in their languages and keyboards? People bought not a cheap toy but an expensive device only to find they can't use it because of some cold war declared by Wacom to them - might sound harsh but that's what it feels like. Recently, the support team doesn't even bother to post anything at all.

You might be interested to read the thread regarding this issue here (just in case you are not well informed about it):

http://forum.wacom.eu/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2249

Note that it's the second largest thread in the forums, while the largest one is full of complaints about Intuos4 nibs being flattened ridiculously fast and their unfavorably high pricing in this regard.

You can read respective thread here:

http://forum.wacom.eu/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1438

Please, Mr. Masahiko, pay attention to these major issues. We really don't want things to turn out this way, and still want to see Wacom as leader in tablet technology. Only decisive actions could stop the bad word of mouth already spoiling its reputation...