Screen Fonts Garbled 1

[tips2002]

A cousin of mine all of a sudden started to get garbled fonts on his screen. Programs that previoulsy looked ok, now were shown with a strikout font. Certain portions of web pages have become unreadable. Looked like very tiny 70's computer fonts. He is running Windows ME. He showed me a game that he normally plays on the net and where once were values, symbols appear. Our thought at the time was that maybe certain fonts became corrupted or unusable and that they were being subsituted.
Any suggestions?

 

[dinosnake]

That's true, but that is a function of a program's substitution tables - the OS doesn't do that. Some of your system fonts are corrupted or missing. Here is a list of fonts you should have:

Abadi MT Condensed Light
Arial
Arial Black
Arial bold
Arial Bold italic
Book Antiqua
Calisto MT
Century Gothic
Century Gothic Bold
Century Gothic Gold Italic
Century Gothic Italic
Comic San MS
Comic San MS Bold
Copperplate Gothic Bold
Copperplate Gothic Light
Courier 10, 12, 15
Courier New
Courier New Bold
Courier New Bold Italic
Courier New Italic
Impact
Lucida Console
Lucida Handwriting Italic
Lucida Sans Italic
Lucida Sans Unicode
Marlett
Martisse ITC
MS Sans Serif 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 24
MS Serif 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 24
News Gothic MT
News Gothic MT Bold
News Gothic MT Italic
OCR A Extended
Small Fonts
Symbol
Symbol 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 24
Tahoma
Tahoma Bold
Tempus Sans ITC
Times New Roman
Times New Roman Bold
Times New Roman Bold Italic
Times New Roman Italic
Verdana
Verdana Bold
Verdana Bold Italic
Verdana Italic
Webdings
Westminster
WingDings

restore them from the original .CAB files, get them from a friend's computer or see if you can find them on the Internet to download.

You can put your Windows install CD into the CD drive and start up the Windows FIND command. Search all .CAB files for .TTF and .FON files and any you don't have in the \Windows\Font directory extract and install into the FONT folder. Reboot the system and all should be fine.

If you don't want to go through that you can run the Windows SETUP program FROM WITHIN WINDOWS. This will repair any damages - but note that any files changed to allow some programs to run will be changed back. So doing this can break some programs - you will have to reinstall programs which no longer work. Your mileage may vary...