/ After Registry cleaning fonts are mixed up

After Registry cleaning fonts are mixed up

I ran a registry cleaner and now on my desktop the words are spelled with dots, squares, circles and other things…. Where do I go to reset these settings?

Celeste Stewart Hmmn, this is a tough one. Bear with me as I offer a few suggestions. First, let’s see if we can “un-do” the registry cleaner on the chance that a registry change caused the problem. From there, we’ll look at other ideas.

Undoing Registry Cleaner Changes

Many registry cleaning utilities come with built-in safeguards to overcome undesirable side effects that occasionally occur after a cleaning. For example, the product that we recommend, RegCure, backs up the registry before each cleaning. Afterwards, should you have problems, a quick trip to the Backup section gives you the option to restore any of the earlier registry backups. If the registry cleaner that you used offers a similar feature, go ahead and restore the registry to its earlier state. This may or may not solve the strange symbols problem.

Corrupt Font Files

Where you are seeing these strange symbols? It’s possible that your computer has a corrupt font file. This can occur with individual fonts, such as your default font in Microsoft Word, or even system fonts which used by your operating system on Windows title bars, icons, messages, and so forth.

One thing that you can try is to delete the font cache, which could be corrupt. When deleting this cache, reboot the PC. The cache will be rebuilt automatically. The font cache is located in C:\Windows\ttfCache.

You can also try downloading TweakUI from Microsoft. This is a “Power Toy” that provides additional utilities. One of the options is a “repair fonts” option. Download TweakUI here.

Font corruption can occur system-wide or may only show up in specific applications. For example, if you use Adobe Dreamweaver, and the font used in the User Interface is corrupt, the Dreamweaver’s interface will not display properly. Other programs may not use this font, so when working in your other programs, you won’t notice a problem.

Copying and Pasting

Occasionally, strange symbols and characters are inserted into text when copying and pasting, especially when HTML is involved. To avoid strange characters, try copying and pasting into Notepad first, then copy the Notepad text into your Word or Web page document.

Similarly, when different character sets are used between a source and destination, strange text appears. Solutions vary depending on what applications are involved. For example, if you need to copy text from a web browser but find it copies with odd symbols, try using the browser’s File> Save As option to save the file as a text file. From there, you can open the text file and copy and paste the text into your new document, hopefully without the weird symbols.

I’m not sure why the registry cleaner would have caused this, or if it did. Try undoing the cleaning by restoring an earlier registry and see if that works. If not, I’d look at the possibility of font corruption. Let us know more about where the strange characters fonts are appearing and under what circumstances and we may be able to pinpoint the problem a bit better.