Unexpected characters appear in Windows

[Tanya]

Am running Windows Vista Home Premium, SP 1 with Windows Mail.

Due to catastrophic hardware malfunctions I bought a new system with the new
OS installed for about two days.

Thus far, only Windows Mail shows this problem.

If I go to use end bracket for example (>) - something I like to use when
quoting back replies - it appears only as a period (.)

Question marks (?) come up as some kind of French letter with an accent.

All of the things associated with shift+"x" seem to be fouled ...

A multitude of other characters are also wrong but I think only highlighting
one or two of them is sufficient ....

I am Canadian but do not ever use French language sets or anything outside
of English ...

Thanks if anyone can help me resolve my issue

tanya

 

[Sam Hobbs]

When composing a message, what do you see when you do "View | Encoding"?
When I view your message and do "View | Encoding", it says the encoding is
"User Defined". That is probably the problem. I am not sure what it should
be; probably "Western European (ISO)".

 

[Steve Cochran]

Go to Tools | Options | International and set the default encoding to
Western European and do the same under Tools | Options | Read | Fonts.

In addition go to Control Panel | Regional and language Settings | Keyboards
and make sure you have things set correctly there.

steve