WinFX & Speech Confusion

Just discovered Robert Brown's blog.  He writes in this post about how to open prerecorded audio files for recognition, complete with vb sample code for the WinFX B1rc ... however, instantiating the SpeechRecognizer (should be easy) fails with (a COMException):

Exception from HRESULT: 0x8004503A

   at System.Speech.Recognition.RecognizerBase.Initialize(ISpRecognizer recognizer)
   at System.Speech.Recognition.SpeechRecognizer.Initialize(RecognizerInfo recognizerInfo)
   at System.Speech.Recognition.SpeechRecognizer..ctor()
   at MyProject.Window1..ctor() in C:\Documents and Settings\SomeUser\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\MyProject\MyProject\Window1.xaml.cs:line 31

Anyone have any ideas? I'm just trying to: SpeechRecognizer _recognizer = new SpeechRecognizer(); inside an Avalon app; the exception is thrown both when I declare the variable as a private variable in the class or when I try to instantiate it in the constructor.