When you first set up windows, it asks you for a regionalization setting. What country are you from, time zone, etc. This sets up lots of different settings, including wether to use , or . for decimals, and how to seperate thousands from hundreds.
In America, (where most DB coders are from), numbers look like this:
"100,000.36" which reads as 100 thousand and 36 hundredths.
The same number in most of europe probably looks like this:
100 000,36 or even 100.000,36
This problem wasn't something I understood until quite a while after I started coding for DB. There are places in the code that explicitly assume that decimals are XXX.XXX, and there are other bits that use VB to determine which to use, and VB bases it's decision on the windows regional settings.
It's not getting fixed anytime soon because it would require basically going over all the GUI code, text literals, etc. It's just too big a task.
However, the good news is that this is handled very well in the .NET framework, so any code based on it for DB 3 will allow for international settings.