Hi!
I've noticed that a lot of people have this problem, and I myself had a lot of problems finding the solution.
If you've set up your own custom story using this guide:
http://wiki.frictionalgames.com/hpl2/amn...stom_story
know that it forgets to mention something that is actually pretty simple. You need to make sure that the files needed actually gets saved as .cfg and .lang files!
When saving the text files like "name.cfg" and "name.lang" with notepad, it might look right in explorer, but they are actually still .txt-files.
To see this you need to find the folder settings that lets you see all file extensions. (Can't help you with this sorry) Now you can cleary see that the file names are
"name.cfg.txt" and "name.lang.txt"
Now, just erase the ".txt" in the file names. You might get a warning that the files could become unusable, but just confirm.
This worked for me, and I hope these instructions (however very clumsy and confusing) can help someone else.