Hi again. I've just found this from a blog tweeted yesterday by the Visio twitter account. It could be the reason for this problem:
"Filter for current drawing's units
Note: only affects US (and Canadian) users.
The More Shapes browse menu now filters its results based on your current drawing's unit selection, ensuring you choose a stencil with the correct units, resulting in shapes that look and behave great on your page. If your document is US, you will only see US stencils, and vice versa."
First, it's not going to affect only US and Canadian users, its going to affect drawings based on Imperial units (or US units as Visio calls them) i.e. inches, feet, yards, miles etc. Is the filtering based on the locale or the drawing units?
Second, not all stencils available outside Microsoft are in US and Metric versions. Are metric only stencils going to be totally invisible to US (and Canadian) users?
Has somebody not thought this through ?