Weird IM Problem

Factual Questions
1

Instant messaging is ubiquitous at my company, and I’ve recently started to have the weirdest problem with one of my co-workers: all of the IMs I get from him look like “.” Jeff can see the words I send to him, and neither of us has this issue with anyone else; it just seems to be something in the way his app “talks” to mine. This problem started last week: neither of us made any changes to our IM application before the weird stuff started happening.

I am running AOL Instant Messenger 5.9.3690 on Windows 2000 Professional; Jeff is running Kopete on Linux.

I did find one thing about rectangles on the AIM site, and it says:

However, Jeff and I had been able to IM each other just fine up until last week, and he has no problem IMing other people on Windows 2000 machines.

Both of us are computer literate (Jeff way more so than me), and neither of us can figure out how to diagnose this problem that only happens between us. Yesterday Jeff asked if I had maybe changed my computer’s locale setting (perhaps in the course of documenting some software), but I hadn’t. I’ve had no luck looking up this issue online, and figured I’d post my question here before contacting the folks at either application’s company (I fear they will blame each other).

Has anyone heard of – or better yet, solved – a problem like this before?

2

Try having your friend change the font he’s using.

3

We tried that, thanks. :frowning:

4

Ask him to try a different aim client. Or perhaps a reinstall is in order.

5

The plan for tomorrow is for me to IM him using Trillian, and see what I get in return. If it’s still rectangles, I’ll ask him to reinstall Kopete.

But if the problem is his application, wouldn’t he be sending rectangles to everyone else who is using Win2K, too?

6

Rectangles are almost always a sign of unsupported fonts. You can test this by copying the rectangles he is sending you in IM’s and pasting them into a word processor. When you do that you should be able to see words where you pasted.

So what does this mean? Perhaps you need to have your IM client reinstalled, or find out what font he is sending to you in and get that font installed on your pc. At any rate, I’m inclined to think the problem is on your pc and not his, especially if others don’t see rectangles from this guy.