I'm having the exact problem, it started the night before last night. At first I thought it was a virus, but I figured it couldn't be as I have the latest microsoft patches, fixes, anti-virus definitions, and run Ad-aware & Spybot on a regular basis; I also have spyware guard installed and use the CA EZ Firewall, which is always running. Plus, I never follow links or open questionable attachments. This happenned right after I viewed a Movielink movie, which I was concerned that may it had a trojan in or something. At any rate, I ran the latest virus scanners, including Stinger and nothing showed up.
Basically, I'm ussing Windows XP Pro and after the movie played, everything changed to the Marlett Font and It is a huge problem. I could't read anything - Picture your computer with chinese characters instead of English, except the Marlett font shows up as geometric symbols and the like. For example, my START button has replaced the "S" for a ?, the "T" for a solid triangle, the "A" for a check mark, the "R" for a indented X, and the "T" again a solid triangle
I reeboted and went on Safe Mode and still this crazy font is all over the place. Everything seems to run fine, like I can play movies and so forth, except when you go to Word, you pull up any document and it has the same crazy font and when you try to change, there is no other font except the Marlett, wingdyms and some other symbols font
Now, what I have done so far; which allowed me to have at least 60% of my fonts displayed in some normal mode is as follows: (By the way, you will need an another XP Pro computer next to yours to help you recognize the Icons, Tabs, and you'll be able to tell the OK, CANCEL & APPLY by simply counting the characters and that they usually are positioned OK (left), CANCEL (center) & APPLY (right)
1) I first went to the Control Panel, and selected "Date, Time, Language. and Regional Options" (It's the Globe icon w/ a calendar page," then select the little globe for "Regional and Language options," then select the 3rd tab "advanced" and on the first selection, pick anything other than what is already selected. Then select the right radio button that should be the "Apply" button, then select YES (right button) and YES again, and it will reboot your computer and then low and behold you'll at least be able to see western characters, it might be set to Guatemalan Spanish or something like that, but simply go back through this step again and change it back to US English. You should be able to see at leat 40 - 60% of the characters in normal font.
2) The problem here is that still not everything is back to normal, all the desktop icons would be in western normal letters but most windows menus (start, etc) and application menus will still be Marlett font. What I did next was as follows:
I went to 'Start', 'Settings', 'Control Panel', 'Display' and selected either one of the default available themes (Windows XP or Windows Classic). This made several things go back to normal, like the title bars, etc.
My problem is that I have exhausted all other options and while my XP Pro is approx 70% back to normal, I cannot use any of the Office XP Pro because they still have the weird Marlett font and you cannot read any saved documents ad there are only 3 fonts available (in Word) marlett, wingdyngs and symbols.
Anyway, I hope someone that has gone through this nightmare is gracious enough to those of us who still have a malfunctioning Windows XP Pro system. My hope is that I could somehow reinstall only the XP Pro system fonts, which appear to be corrupted, so that I don't have reinstall all of windows xp pro again. Your assistance would be greatly appreaciated. I went out of my way to spend a lot money to purchase both the Windows XP Pro and Office XP Pro just so that I could be safeguarded from security and crashing (unstability) problems and NO, MicrosSoft continues to fall way under expectations. I just wish Bill Gates would put some of his fortunes towards making his software company much more reliable and secure instead of giving us more useless and unreliable bells and whistles!!! . Perhaps, the solution is to move to Linux!!! I'll continue to wait for MicroSoft to straighten its act though. PLEASE ANY MICROSOFT SUPPORT PEOPLE HELP US HERE!!!!
A very dissapointed XP Pro customer
P.S. It took me and hour of waiting and retrying several times, as every time I submitted my response, it read “SERVICE TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE….PLS TRY AGAIN, LATER†The problem is not on my end, as I’m connected via a Broadband DSL connection. Thank God, I had copied and saved this, otherwise, my long detailed explanation / fix would have been a complete waste. This is the unreliability issues that I do not expect to endure from the world’s leading software maker. There’s simply no excuse for the extremely low service levels this company provides. PLS REINVEST MONEY IN YOUR SECURITY< SUPPORT & RELIABILITY – our World literally counts on it!!!!
