ID CS4 spelling checker anomalies

Question

Hi all,
I wonder if anyone can shed any light on this?
I'm trying to spelling-check a long text document in ID CS4.  It's essentially a simple document -- all text, with some paragraph styles applied for formatting chapter headings, but nothing complex or layered.  The UK dictionary is applied in all styles, and the whole thing is set in a quality font (Adobe's Minion Pro), so I know there's no strange glyph coding going on.  Typographic quotes have been used.
The spelling checker is doing three strange things.
1)  It's faltering after quoted speech.  If I have a line that says
"Spell-check this," he said.
it seems to be treating the close-quotes as if they're the end of a sentence.  So the spelling checker halts on "he" and asks for it be capitalised, as if it were the start of a new sentence.  On every similar instance throughout the 400-odd page document, it's repeating this pattern.  Is this working as intended?  (That seems a strange choice for how it should work, if that's what it is.)  If not, does anyone know how to change this behaviour, please?
2)  Words with a hyphen in the middle, like ill-fated, seem to stump the checker.  If I click on the button to add the word to my user dictionary, the button then greys out, as if it's been added, but at every subsequent occurrence of the same word the checker will stop and not recognise the word.  If I click on the "Ignore all" button, absolutely nothing happens -- the checker doesn't move on, and it will still stop at the next instance.  "Skip" will move the checker on, but then of course it'll stop at the next instance of the word.  Why is this?
3)  Words that end with 's stump the checker completely.  It won't add them to the user dictionary (I can click on the button, but it doesn't grey out, and the next instance of the same word will hat the checker).  But neither the "ignore all" or the "skip" buttons work in this instance, either.
Any thoughts here?  I'm using version 6.0.5, so there are no updates to be had.

Answer 1

I used the dictionary window at the bottom of the CHARACTER window.
Resetting it in the prefs didnt do anything for me either.
It's still not perfect–you must select all the text, change the dictionary in the CHARACTER window and then spell check.
I also assume that the dictionary setting is buried in paragraph and character styles.
You can change the default language dictionary for a document or for all new documents you create. Changing the default dictionary in an existing document doesn’t affect text that has already been created or text that you type into an existing text frame.
Open the document.
Select the Selection tool from the toolbar and make sure no items are selected in the document.
Choose Type > Character.
Choose the desired dictionary from the Language menu on the Character panel. If you cannot see the language option in the Character panel, select Show Options and then select your language from the list.
Set the default language dictionary for all new documents
Start InDesign, but do not open a document.
Choose Type > Character.
Choose the desired dictionary from the Language pop‑up menu on the Character panel. If you cannot see the language option in the Character panel, select Show Options and then select your language from the list.