I cannot use aspell with 1.7. I have 2 different clean 1.7 installations on the server and neither will work with aspell. I also have a 1.6.3 installation on this server, which works just fine with aspell. We have aspell 0.60.4 installed.

On all 3 installations, we are only using 2 language packs, both downloaded from Moodle:
1) en
2) en_us

I'm attaching 3 screenshots:
1) error_msg.jpg – this shows the error dialog that I get when trying to spellcheck. As you can see by the "", it doesn't seem to be seeing the language? I have tried switching back and forth between en and en_us, just to see if it matters (as well as using plain, accents, no accents, etc.), but I get the exact same error message with all combinations on 1.7.
2) db.gif – this shows a snippet of one of the new 1.7 installations in phpMyAdmin, showing the collation.
3) db2.gif – this shows a snippet of the 1.6.3 installation in phpMyAdmin, showing the collation.