Thanks for the reply, Echo. This was actually causing me a bit of confusion because I'm editing my tags with fb2K and checking them with Tag, the command-line utility. This is what I saw for a recent file:
C:\Documents and Settings\Laptop User\My Documents\music & audio\nintendo\Akihab
ara Electric Circus - Super Mario Bros 3 (1989)\Akihabara Electric Circus - Supe
r Mario Bros 3 - 10 - Ekusutendeddo Bâjon.mp3
Format: MPEG 1 Layer 3, Joint Stereo
Details: 44100 Hz Stereo, 160 kbps, playtime 06:37
Tag: APE v2.0
Title: Extended Version [????????·?????]
Artist: Akihabara Electric Circus
Album: Super Mario Bros. 3
Year: 1989-12-15
Track: 10/10
Genre: Game
Comment: Akihabara Electric Circus [?????·???????·????] presents their 1989 albu
m "Super Mario Bros. 3" [????????????3]. The group is comprised of Hideki Matsut
ake [????], Jun Irie [???], Takashi Matsumoto [???]. Information about the album
is available at the Nintendo Music CD Museum (http://www11.ocn.ne.jp/~koholint/
library/ct32-5329.html).
Composer=Koji Kondo [????]
Publisher=Toshiba EMI [??EMI]
Language=Japanese
Media=CD
(Note that I haven't finish editing the this albums's tags, and the question marks indicate Japanese characters that, of course, won't show up in DOS.) I noticed how the last four entries were marked with equals signs instead of colons, and I began to wonder if this meant that these were disallowed tags. But since they are mentioned at the official (?) list of APE Tag Item Keys, I'm not sure what's going on. Does whether a colon or an equals sign is used mean anything? Thanks much. (The official ID3v2 page seems to be clearer than this page is ...)