Hi, Firek,
Unfortunately launching through AppLocale doesn't solve the problem. The Apostrophe is still a mess

I can’t really help, but it is not an apostrophe, but a curved single quote ’. And it wasn’t a Unicode system back in those days, so it is probably assuming that the default was some sort of Windows Code Page.

Have similar problem with a Simplified Chinese Win7 (even though I use English as display language). It seems to be a fairly comman coding problem, and applocal doesn't help for this particular situation.

You can go to "Control Panel", then "Region and language", then "Administrative", and change the "Language for non-Unicode program" to English. Then you should be able to play with no problem.

However, you may need to change it back to whatever it was after your game session since you programs in Chinese might not work well under such setting. And every time you change this setting, you need to restart your computer. Annoying, isn't it?

Hope GOG can actually fix it up.

PS: This is for WIN7, I don't have a WINXP operation system at hand right now.

seem like i having tis problem too, any new solution?

NTLEA is a good alternative.