drb said:
Ran SFC /scannow in a dos window with a good winxp-pro CD when it asked
for it and it solved the problem. Must have been a corrupt file,
probably marlett.ttf.
Thanks for your help.
You're welcome. I'm glad your problem was solved. But wait...
Maybe not Marlett. I was reading your message in Outlook Express in the
Preview Pane, and went to click Reply Group, and there was a number to the
left of that button on the tool bar, which I never noticed before. Then I
noticed that was not the only button with a number, and realized that I had
numbers instead of triangles. Oh No! It's happening to me! But wait, (the
plot thickens,) at the top of one of the columns of the message list was a
sorting order up triangle. "This is just too weird." If my Marlett were
messed up, there would not be a triangle there. Long story short, I pressed
my PrintScreen key to copy it, started Windows Paint full screen, but
remembered that I forgot to position my mouse pointer over the clock to
capture the date in the tool tip also. What? The triangles in Outlook
Express were back! "Am I hallucinating?" Quick, back to Paint and paste...
Whew! Yes, there were numbers in the screen capture. I did a quick
FileSaveAs to disk. The screen shot with the numbers instead of triangles
included the top portion of your reply. So, "maybe not Marlett."
Of course, for peace of mind, I'm going to run SFC and maybe CHKDSK, and
check Event Viewer for any system log messages. Back tracking my mystery
numbers problem: I had just downloaded new messages, switched screens to my
dialing program to disconnect, and switched back to OE, and began to view
your reply. So the problem appeared when the OE window was repainted back to
the screen after being covered by another window. I don't know what DLL is
involved with that. Or there could have been a glitch in the font cache.
Hopefully it will never happen again.
I just checked the system log in Event Viewer, which shows the disconnect
time, and 4 minutes later the "Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) services" was
started when I pressed the Print Screen key. No explanation of why Marlett
was AWOL when the toolbar appeared, but not when columns appeared.
(Bad Font, bad Font, whatcha gonna do, when the screen paints you?
Cheers! --Richard
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