State-province Table Abbreviation Values are Not Valid for Many Records and No Work-around for Profile View

We display the civicrm_state_province.abbreviation value for State/Province fields in contact/view and in Profiles which include a State/Province field. This works fine for US and many other countries in the table. However, the table has approx 1400 records in which the abbreviation is either a (meaningless?) numeric value or in a few
cases a single letter ('A').

We have a work-around for contact/view - which is to set Address Format to use state_province_name. However, this does not work when viewing a Profile with a State/Province field in it.

I don't recall what the source of these values was - but for folks using this field in many countries (including France and China) - the default output is problematic.

If we can figure out a source for useful abbreviation values for these country's provinces - and load those in civicrm_state_province - that would be cool. Else, fallback is to modify Profile view to always use state_province.name.

— original post by rafi ------
I create a profile called "Address" which has a field called "County/state" . This has mostly list of all states in all countries. Now the problem is when a user save some data in this profile and this field, the values after saving appears in "User record" in drupal is different. e.g. if someone choose "cambridgeshire" in UK then record appears as "CAM" after saving. And if for example "Shanghai" in china, the data appears after saving is "31" .

I checked in demo site, the problem is there as well.

I am using civicrm v1.7. 9379 with drupal 5.1

--rafi