I just started Hal on the other computer to get a better idea of what you are saying. I went to options, Speach, the Use Speach is checked. In the Select Engine I changed from Dragon to Microsoft Eng US. Speaker shows as Carl. I get nothing when clicking SR engine settings, mic settings, or voice training.
I did my initial training of Dragon and MS outside of Hal and probably never tried these buttons and as you say they don't seem to work.
I just went to MS Speach Rec in the Control panel, did some training, On the left hand side is Advanced speech options, clicking this brings up Speech Properties, in the center of this you can Review Documents and Mail to improve accuracy, this works very well with dragon. I began dictating into notepad during the morning and evening about the days events and have a lot of text files that I input to dragon, it gets a new version of dragon very accurate quickly once you have text files to use.
In defense of Zabaware, Zabaware is planning on releasing a new character at the end of the month, Rob M may be busy on that, overall he is easy to deal with and the people at Zabaware try to offer advice that is useful.
Carl2