Speech Recognition limited to commands...

For some reason my Speech Recognition only seems to work with commands, when
i open up wordpad or notepad (or any other program I'm supposed to dictate
in) All I get is "What was that?" from the speech bar. I can control my
computer all da long with commands so I know it is'nt my mic. Also I know
that it is capable of dictation because if I use the How Do I... command, I
can say "How Do I Eat A Pizza", sure enough, on cue the Windows Help and
Support window pops up with Best results for "Eat A Pizza". But it does not
work with any kind of dictation, I've tried enabling "enable dictation
anywhere", I have done about 4 training sessions with it and the tutorials
went smoothly, even the microphone setup told me that Vista hears me fine.
I've tried just about every combination of options I could see as having a
possible effect to no avail. Could anyone help me with this?