No text labels for icons or menus Win95

[nolacoaches]

Some one brought me a Win95 PC with a strange display issue. The desktop icons have no text, only a black box below, until you click on it, then the text label appears. When you open IE, there are no text labels on the menu, only "-" (dashes). If you click a dash, the drop down menu is ok. The biggest problem, however, is when looking at network properties, the adapters, protocols and clients have no text label, so you can't see the TCP/IP protocol linked to a particular adapter. Is there anyway to restore the missing text information?

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

[SimonDavis]

Sounds wierd.

Is it possible that someone has messed with the color schemes, and made the menu texts the same color as the background?

First thind I'd try is setting the color scheme to default.

 

[TekTippy4U]

Ya, sounds like the stupid Appearance tab settings were set to "squeeze" proportions.... and same color text and background.
Right click blank desktop area and deselect Active desktop >> "View as a web page" if it's ticked.

Mess around in Display Properties Appearance tab (choose another "Scheme" in the Drop down Box and Save it...click OK OK)

if no go
Go into Control Panel - Add/Remove Programs - Windows Setup and go into Desktop Themes and remopve them, reboot and reinstall......

TT4U

Notification:
These are just my thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs

 

[nolacoaches]

Thanks for the suggestions. Here's what I've done so far. Turned off backgrounds, wallpaper and active desktop. changed to various appearance schemes, created a registry entry for maxcachedicons 2000, increased memory to 64MB, updated to Windows 98.

It's still bizaare. Sometimes the text is there when I reboot, but it disaapears with a mouse over. Same with the start menu, sometimes the text is there and sometimes on the underbar that would be under the Alt Letter, when I move the mouse over, sometimes the text appears and sometimes it disappears. When I open control panel, some of the icons have text labels and some of them don't. I would like to avoid wiping everything and reinstalling all of the apps, but don't know what else to do at this point.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

[torturedmind]

sounds like your display fonts has been resized to an annoyingly small size. check again your display properties, go to "appearance" tab, and in the items field, select any items that has font size smaller than 5 and change them back to 8.

hope this helps. peace!

kilroy
philippines

"Illegitimis non carborundum!"

 

[nolacoaches]

Here's what seems to fix the problem. All of the default schemes use MS Sans Serif, a .fon font using fontview.exe. So I created a scheme using a TrueType font, Tahoma. Now everything seems to appear, no more disappearing Text Labels. fontview.exe seems to have the same properties as other win98 pc's, so maybe the sans serif font is corrupt. Windows never runs out of wierdness.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein