Suddenly, my spouse’s computer has developed 2 problems in an instant, for no reason I can figure out. The greater problem is that a certain % of letters of text do not render property. They are sort of half-bold, and a little bit shadowed. Maybe every 5th or 3rd or 10th letter goes like that. It occurs everywhere except on web pages. It occurs in all Windows programs, inside Outlook email, Wordpad documents [rtf], and in all the menus, toolbars, and structural bits of those programs, including the frames and structures of Firefox and IE. Only in the body of web pages does it not occur.
The other weird thing is that when this happened, the frames of web pages and all other programs [Wordpad, etc..] shifted northeast a little bit, so that the X which closes pages/programs is now slightly out of sight. Thank goodness for ALT-F4.
The fonts thing is the greater problem. Text is readable, but awkward.
If anyone has any suggestions about this, fire away.
Thanks very much.
Font Cache troubleshooting
If your fonts are not appearing correctly in the font menu or in documents (“garbled” is a common term for this), then one of the best solutions is to clear your font cache. Depending upon your system and application programs, this may entail deleting multiple font cache files.
What is a font cache file?
These are files used by the operating system and certain applications to keep track of what fonts are installed. If the font cache gets corrupted a variety of problems can ensue, including fonts not appearing in the font list in an application, or wrong fonts (or missing fonts) in documents.
How to clear the font cache
The best approach to delete the font cache file(s). It’s OK to delete these files, as they will automatically be restored once your system is restarted, or when you relaunch an application.
Windows 2000/XP/Vista
The Windows operating system has a font cache file that is located here:
C:\Windows\System32\FNTCACHE.DAT
Delete this file, and restart your system. A new FNTCACHE.DAT file will be created on startup.