Acrobat 8 and A4

Okay this is really annoying, my Vista laptop came with a copy of Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Standard which is surprisingly nice except I've now run across a basic assumption that is causing problems. The assumption is that I'm American and as such use English (USA) and Letter sized paper. This came up using the create PDf from scanner function all the A4 scans had their ends chopped off; I check the settings and see that duh it was set to Letter, I duly set it to the only viable option A4LETTER; still scanning as a Letter. I check the settings (and incidentally crash Vista twice accessing the General page) and change the New Document to A4; I check the PDF printer and change the default to A4. I check the scanner software and confirm it's set to A4.

It still scans in at Letter.

I check the Distiller program and think I've found the problem - the measurements correspond to Letter format. I change them, it prompts me to save these settings to a file; I do so and reload. Oh look the settings aren't there for me to pick - ah I'll Add Settings, select the file and "Unable to create file" it's trying to dump it in an non-existent Administrator folder.

I run as Administrator, still can't save, I add the folder structure and file manually, still can't see it or save it.

So is there a workaround? Yes when you want to create from Scan instead of Hide Native Interface you have to show it instead. This means I click Scan, it opens up the Canoscan interface I have to hit scan again, watch it work, watch it disappear, and select 'Add another page' hit scan and watch it open again - repeat until annoyed. (Apparently there's another method to be able to select A4 rather than A4LETTER , but it involves a Registry Edit and the details are for XP and apparently don't look to stable either)

Seriously it's not as if A4 is some wacky English only size it's used throughout Europe, but hey why am I surprised everyone's American!