characters gone haywire on laptop

phantom_lord

I switched on the laptop, the password screen came up for xp, and instead of the usual language there was crazy symbols. Everything character on the screen has been replaced by this arabic type stuff or bold arial type front.

On the previous session on the pc I didn't download anything, I've anti virus stuff, norton and avg. And the scans have come up clean.

I did clean up registry issues in cccleaner and stopped some of the programs that normaly switched on start-up. I'm just wondering if that did something,

other than that I'm stumped. Never seen anything like it. Any help would be much appriciated.

phantom_lord

The title of the thread appears in crazy symbols, and the text in heavy arial. In case that helps...

Ruu_Old

Try Start->Control Panel->Regional and Language Settings, click the Languages tab and then see if you have English (Irish) set there and the same in the Advanced tab.

MunsterCycling

Emm OP can you login?? If you can't login due to this prob Ruu your suggestion although helpful is a bit of a non starter.

Try safe mode (hold F8 on startup) and see if you can login?

MC

phantom_lord

Ruu wrote:

Try Start->Control Panel->Regional and Language Settings, click the Languages tab and then see if you have English (Irish) set there and the same in the Advanced tab.

Yep, that's right.


I can log in, just finding the right setting in the control panel was difficult...

phantom_lord

Anyone have any more ideas?

Ruu_Old

The fonts folder could have become corrupt somehow. I'm not sure how you can rebuild that folder unless you have something like TweakUI, I think that might allow you to rebuild the font cache. It might work, I'll see if i can find another way.

challengemaster

windows repair using the disk maybe?

Ruu_Old

Yeah the recovery console using the XP cd might be the only way I can think of.

phantom_lord

ok thanks, I'll give that a try. Just gotta find the cd...

JohnnieM

[

Is this an ACER laptop by any chance?