Very odd Windows 98 font problem

Factual Questions
1

This is really irritating me.

My fonts aren’t displaying correctly in Windows 98.

I installed Win98 and a few other bits and pieces (Opera, ZoneAlarm, Office etc) a few days ago – nothing to do with fonts. Everything worked fine.

Two days ago I noticed that fonts weren’t rendering properly in web pages displayed by Opera. Changes made to my preferences weren’t taking effect; e.g. I set my forms text to default to OCR A Extended (which I have and which works fine in Word) but they default to either Arial or System. Some fonts didn’t display at all; on some pages, text appears in that MS Outlook-style font as a load of rectangles. If I cut and paste into Notepad, the text appears normal. What’s even stranger is that there’s no consistency; on some pages it’s a line of Impact that appears as boxes; on some it’s Verdana; on some it’s Arial – but all three fonts are installed and display correctly on most pages. The problem doesn’t occur in IE6.

I assumed this was an Opera problem and reinstalled. No change. I downloaded the 6.02 version of Opera tonight. No change.

Now I notice that in Windows Media Player 7.1 the left hand nav bar (where it says “CD Audio”, “Media Library” etc) is also being shown in the Outlook-style rectangles.

It may sound trivial but it’s bleedin’ irritating trying to work out what the button labels are, and the lack of consistency means that I doubt it’s a problem with the font files themselves – after all, they do appear correctly on some pages and when I use them in Word.

Help!

2
      • I got a wierd problem also: I reinstalled Win98SE on my main PC and it has something of a peculiar problem, in that it doesn’t display fonts in some circumstances and shortcuts properly.
  • The first wierd thing I noticed after reinstalling was that Windows couldn’t display the standard window-title font (whichever it is) the right way: for instance, the “X”/“Close” buttons on all the windows was a delta symbol pointing to the right, instead of an “X”. It didn’t look like the “>” symbol, it looked like the parts of the letter “X” weren’t lined up right… If you hit it, and held the mouse button down while ragging the cursor off the button, the window wouldn’t close but the font would switch to displaying the proper “X”…??? Programs such as Word all display the document fonts properly on your documents, but Windows couldn’t display the standard system text on the window title bars right sometimes. It started out doing it every time, but gradually did it less and less, until it rarely does it anymore. These are the standard system fonts it’s messing up, that the MS Win98SE CD installs itself (CD purchased retail, not a burned copy). The CD doesn’t appear to have any physical damage on its surface… The Win98 installer automatically runs and must complete scandisk before it will attempt to install the OS, and I have since ran additional/other disk checks, and found no reported problems with the HD.
  • The other thing is that all the desktop cursors have a vertical bar through them where the colors are confused. It’s like a small break, like the image file for the shortcut is damaged, but it’s that way with all the shortcuts, OS/system ones as well as all the program/software ones, and it doesn’t matter if I delete them and “re-do” them, the new ones all look the same way, with the same vertical bar/mistake. They nver looked that way before either.
  • I have installed Win98 on this machine twice before, with exactly the same hardware setup, and it didn’t do this either of the other two times. I have updated Win98, but that didn’t make any difference. Everything works as normal, but once in a while a new Window will look funny because all the text is scrambled… -I have two other PC’s running Win98 and Win95, and I have not ever seen this happen with either of them before.
  • I run no virus program, but I observed this problem first right after I reformatted and reinstalled, before I loaded any device drivers or software. - DougC