Windows fonts turned to wingdings

[csimike]

Hey all,

wondering if anyone's seen this before. All of the windows text has turned from english word to wingding symbol language (i.e. icon names, system tray, menusm window titles etc.) if you open a program the program language is fine, also dos mode is fine, it seems that all of the windows shell fonts have changed. It's hard to manuever around because I don't read symbol language, but it seems like all the language settings are okay.

This started with a system slow down, I went to reboot the system and I got for the first time the wupdater.exe could close, I forced it to close then continued with the reboot, upon rebooting back into XP all fo the fonts had turned to wingding.

I've never seen this before, not sure if anyone else has, I've tried reloading xp but I keep getting some sort of error, unfortunatly because it's in symbols I don't know what the error is.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

thanks

[Beginner]

Ths same problem has happened to me - can someone let me know what I need to do to fix the issue?

[csimike]

Hey Beginner, if you goto the following forum

http://computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/wwwboard.html

and you do a search for wingdings it will pull up a thread that has what you need to do. Basically you need to go under the display properties and go to the apperance tab which should be the 4th tab from the left. Goto the advanced tab which should be bottom right of the window. Once there click on the item drop down and go through all item in there, assign font to each of them that you can. This should clear up half of the things in there, enough to finish the fix.

You will then need to check under control panel - Fonts - to see if your fonts are there, probably not. You will need to find the fonts and copy them into this directory, mine were under a fonts dirctory under program files. Once you get the fonts to stay in the control panel fonts directory you can reboot and everything should come back, it took me 4 tries to get the fonts to actually stay there. Unfortunately whatever happened also messed up my Internet explorer by deleting the version information, as well as killing the keyboard driver, I couldn't fix the keyboard without IE which kept thinking it was lower than 5.5. I eventually had to give up and re-install XP. I've got IE working again but still having a problem with the keyboard typing the wrong letters. Not sure what's up with that.

Good luck

[Beginner]

Thanks for the quick response. I'll try this later. Any idea what causes this issue in the first place? I can't find anything on Microsoft's web site yet it would appear to be an O/S issue and not h/ware related?

[csimike]

No problem, good luck.... Not sure what caused mine, it seems like it was a virus of some kind, but I've checked the system with 4 different virus programs and none of them have found anything. I searched around looking for a way to fix the problem, I finally decided to try a couple of these forums hoping someone somewhere had experienced the same thing.

Maybe someone reading this might be able to shed some light...

[Beginner]

Issue's now fixed thanks. In the end I did a Windows XP restore from a restore point from about a week ago. Needed to run this from the DOS prompt so I could read it, but it worked fine.

[csimike]

good deal glad to hear it, my restore kept saying it could'nt finish no matter what I tried, so you can be thankful yours worked.

good luck in the future