This is a good one

[papa1]

Hi People;
I don't really need help as System Restore was able to fix this but I'd like some ideas as to what the heck happened.
I spent yesterday morning doing my usual web surfing( I'm a shift worker ). This morning my wife turned on the computer to check the e-mail and only got to the login screen and realized something was terribly wrong. She described it as "everything looks like Chinese". I booted it up at 7AM when I got home and for a few seconds thought she was correct. However the computer(XP Pro),for whatever reason, simply wasn't interpreting code into a readable interface.
I have NAV,SPF firewall and nothing unusual was picked up. It just seems as though the OS forgot to make the interface readable.
Any Ideas? Hacked Maybe? Ran Spybot,Adaware and hiJack and all are clean!
The only thing that saved my butt was that the Icons remained intact and that my limited and rapidly failing memory didn't fail this time. What fun it is to try to run programs by guesswork because the weird sequence of squares,circles and triangles,etc. make no sense.
Has anyone any ideas?
Elwood,
AKA...Papa1

 

[bcastner]

The tahoma font got corrupted for some reason is my guess.

 

[papa1]

bcastner;
You could be right. I don't have a clue why that would happen but as long as RESTORE fixed it I'm happy. Gotta love my XP. Methinks I play with too many downloads and deletes! I've done an SFC /SCANNOW to be sure.
Thanks,
Papa1