Dictation and Speech Preference Pane Broken in ML

Question

So I got Mountain Lion installed (upgrade from SL), most everything seems to be working fine except for one odd quirk. I was excited to try out the new dictation feature, however when I try to open the preference pane I get:
The first time I try it (on freshly opened System Prefs), this this hereafter:
I defintely have an intel mac, but it does not make sense why the Speech pane will not work on Intel, definitely something goofy going on.
I tried the usual Repaired Permissions, restart etc. to no avail. I drilled down into the console log files and found this every time I tried to open up the pane:
Process:         DictationIM [63752]
Path:            /System/Library/Input Methods/DictationIM.app/Contents/MacOS/DictationIM
Identifier:      DictationIM
Version:         1.0.51 (1.0.51)
Code Type:       X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [294]
User ID:         501
Date/Time:       2012-07-28 19:46:05.913 -0400
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.8 (12A269)
Report Version:  10
Crashed Thread:  0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
Exception Type:  EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** setObjectForKey: key cannot be nil'
terminate called throwing an exception
abort() called
Any ideas how to fix this issue? Everything else on ML works great (except for full screen mode when you have more than one monitor hooked up, but I won't even get into that)
17" MacBook Pro Late 2010, 2.66ghz Intel Core i7, 8gb ram

Answer 1

I did check that already (it is unchecked, everything running in 64 bit) ... still no dice.
I did just try using it on another blank user account, and it works there. Would be nice to be able to use it without having to transfer everything to a new account!