Sound familiar?

#1 · January 27, 2004, 3:50 pm

Posted by: N2theSon <N2theSon@...>

Got a call from a friend to help him. He was getting ready to install WinXP Pro on a new HD. Backed up his existing to an external HD, then restarted his computer (can't remember why). Upon restarting, all menus, icon labels, text boxes, etc., etc., etc. were filled with garbage characters. That's when he called me.

I finally discovered that somehow, all his font files disappeared. Gone. The Fonts folder is empty. Somehow Marlett (non-text characters used for many Windows functions) is hanging around somewhere, and Windows was substituting that for other fonts. I tried to type in Word and it showed the default font, Times New Roman, but my WYSIWYG was Marlett.

We decided to just put in the new drive and do a virgin Windows install. Configured Setup to boot from CD, popped in disk and got an error that it wouldn't load because NTLDR was missing. I retried several times and it finally booted. XP is now installing.

I'm puzzled as to what might have caused all this. Does this sound like virus-like activity?

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