When trying to open DW I get a window with "cannot load transcoding service"
"Xerces panic error"
I have tried to find info in various forums and websites with not much joy, all I can find is to reinstall my OS, which I dont fancy...any ideas anyone?

Have you tried uninstalling Dreamweaver and then re-installing it?
Have you had a look on the Macromedia site for help there?

Uninstalling DW doesn't work and the Macromedia help is no use at all,
from what I can gather "xerces" is something to do with a company called "Apache"
so macromedia decry any responsibility.
Bit shabby for a big company really.
Seems as if a lot of people have bother with this.

Apache is a webserver, I wouldn't think that this should cause an error. Maybe you could try installing apache (http://www.apache.org) it might help

possibly...

Contact their support. If they've told you that it's not about DW but about your OS, then contact the OS support. I've never heard of that error be4 so can't help you, sorry

what version of windows are you running? (including service packs)

The following corrected the issue on my WinXP Pro 2004 system for Dreamweaver MX 2004. The problem, in my case anyway, stemmed from the registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\Charset\iso-2022-kr

In which the value name "EncodingPage" was actually misspelled as "EngodingPage". After renaming the value correctly Dreamweaver was able to start without a problem.

It appears as though the xerces dll, when parsing the registry, is not tolerant of misspellings or possibly other errors so don't limit your search to simply the iso-2022-kr Reg Key, it may be any subset key of Charset causing the problem. I checked another XP Pro SP2 system and the Value name was correctly spelled so I'm not sure what caused the issue in the first place, though I'd guess it was simply a sloppy program installed along the way. Good luck, happy hunting, and please please PLEASE backup your registry before messing around in there!

-Mel

Whoops, I meant "InternetEncoding" not "EncodingPage", sorry. The misspelling was still in the word Encoding, but I was merging the two Value names.

ya try installing apache