Corrupted display text

[Guest]

My father-in-law can no longer read his computer display (he is running XP on
a Mash Tower) - everything seems to work fine but the characters look like
wing-ding, i.e no English text at all in menus, dialogue boxes etc....(except
for dialogue box headings!).

He has up-to-date Beta 1 spyware, up-to-date Norton 2005 and has done full
scans with no error reports. We tried a scan disk but could not progress
this - we couldn't read the messages. We have tried F8 'choose an earlier
configuration' and have tried several system restores - there did seem to be
a brief message concerning system registry but it was too quick to read.
Nothing else seems to work.

Oh, and the directory for fonts is completely empty.

It is proving impossible to sort this via the telephone - we shall have
large bills!

Has anyone come across this? Can anyone offer a suggestion?

Thanks, Mark.

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Use System Restore to Undo Changes if Problems Occur
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/systemrestore.mspx

How to restore the operating system to a previous state in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q306084

How to start the System Restore tool at a command prompt in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;304449

How to Perform a Windows XP Repair Install
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User
Microsoft Community Newsgroups
news://msnews.microsoft.com/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

:

| My father-in-law can no longer read his computer display (he is running XP on
| a Mash Tower) - everything seems to work fine but the characters look like
| wing-ding, i.e no English text at all in menus, dialogue boxes etc....(except
| for dialogue box headings!).
|
| He has up-to-date Beta 1 spyware, up-to-date Norton 2005 and has done full
| scans with no error reports. We tried a scan disk but could not progress
| this - we couldn't read the messages. We have tried F8 'choose an earlier
| configuration' and have tried several system restores - there did seem to be
| a brief message concerning system registry but it was too quick to read.
| Nothing else seems to work.
|
| Oh, and the directory for fonts is completely empty.
|
| It is proving impossible to sort this via the telephone - we shall have
| large bills!
|
| Has anyone come across this? Can anyone offer a suggestion?
|
| Thanks, Mark.

 

[Guest]

Well first of all, thank you Carey for taking the time to respond.

Unfortunately none of the remedies permitted a restore - message 'unable to
restore' - and we tried several restore points (although there were very few
and none earlier than 1 August 2005 - my laptop has many, many months
available).

We managed to track down the offending text - it's Marlett - which is the
only available font in Word. We managed to do a file search and all fonts
appear to be in C:\windows\fonts but they do not 'appear' in the font
dialogue box.

Does this sound viral to anyone?

Any other suggestions please?

 

[Guest]

Well, I spent most of Sunday checking for spyware and viruses in safe mode
and still no joy - it wasn't helped by the fact that my father-in-law likes
flight sims - there were 400,000 files to scan.

We tried to downloan a systemclean but this is impossible when you cannot
decipher instructions in Marlett.

Anyway we managed to restore the majority of the text by using desktop
propeties and 'advanced settings' to select sytem text for menus, tool bars,
active windows etc....

We then performed a search and copied fonts from the search into the empty
fonts folder. This sorted Word out but the fonts were still not viewable
when opening the fonts folder - to our dismay we found we then had double the
number of fonts when we performed another search.

We also tried to delete Marlett but the system wouldn't let us.

Finally when we re-booted we lost all of our text again.

The father-in-law is seriously considering buying a new machine - surely
there must be another way?

Help!

 

[S. Taylor]

No 1 protective program is aware of every threat to system.
You should use multiple anti-virus and anti-malware programs.
Free online AV scanning services recomended by many in this ng:
Trand Micro http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
Computer Associates (aka CA )
http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/virusinfo/scan.aspx

Free Anti-Malware resources:
Spybot Search & Destroy www.spybot.info Spybot has other function for
protecting IE, monitoring BHO's etc.
Ad-Aware SE http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
HijackThis http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/index.html

As a next to last resort (before you get desperate enough to try a clean
install) try running
this command from a dos prompt:
sfc /scannow