Opera Text Problem

I just installed the newest Opera on my Windows XP Pro desktop (so I'm a new Opera user), just to have as a nice alternative to Firefox, which likes to hoard 200MB of RAM per session.

Anyway, all the text (except button text I guess) of any page I go to is fucked up. Each character is displayed as this symbol of which I don't know the name of. I've gone through preferences within Opera and nothing has helped. I've installed Opera on a similar setup on my laptop and it it works just fine, with everything displaying normally.

Here's a screenshot of what happens:



ZOMGWTF ¯\(o_O)/¯

Every character is that "C" thing. When I copy-and-paste some highlighter text into say, Notepad, the text is just fine.

I'm wondering if it might not be Opera's fault and be some setting somewhere else in Windows, but I wouldn't know where that would be. No other application exhibits this strange behavior, and again, this all looks fine on my laptop. I'll try installing an older version maybe and seeing what happens.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Try making sure the text selection is correct. You may be set to a language you don't have installed. Usually Automatic selection works though.

Check View --> Encoding --> Automatic Selection or UTF-8 to see if it displays correctly.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Have you tried going under View -> Encoding -> Automatic Encoding ? That's what mine is set to and things looks alright.

Not to start a flamewar or anything, but I busted open the task manager in XP to compare memory usage between FF and Opera, there was hardly a difference. I had 7 of the same pages open in each browser and there was a 4mb increase in FireFox. Keep in mind that's 4mb of my 2000mb of RAM. Hardly worth the switch.

edit: Damn. Beat me to it. :P

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Yeah, I already checked the encoding. That was one of the first things I did. I've messed through all the settings within Opera and think it's something outside of the program. But, who knows? Any other suggestions?

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Is this problem only specifically happening on Opera, have you tried IE. Also be sure you downloaded the correct version, there are a bunch of versions on thier website. I haven't had any problems and I'm a new user as well. Only drawback is when I'm on the gamingforce forums, the damn thing doesn't update webpages correctly. For instance say I make a topic, then someone replies and when I head to the thread...my post is the only one showing. Firefox is a good alternative but don't use it when viewing websites with tons of media. I have 3 browsers for specific sites becuase these variations we'ere all seeing seem to choke on one website or another.

I was speaking idiomatically.

It only happens with Opera on this machine.

I've also gotten around to trying older versions of Opera (eew, with ads). Actually I only went as far down as the 7 series. But all those failed as well. The same text display problem occured.

Any other ideas?

Yeah, the reason I'm using it has because Firefox craps out at some sites randomly. Sometimes it'll just close on on certain videos. It may also just close viewing some wiki articles. It's whack. And I want to avoid using IE as much as possible, so Opera would be the way to go. I've diffed the preferences files from my laptop and desktop, and they're a match. This one's somewhat blowing my mind. I'll keep figuring on things to try out, but please suggest anything that might help.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Uh, un-install Opera from your computer, and manually delete the files from your "Program Files" in the C drive. Re-install, and pray for the best?

It worked a few people, but, I'm also having the same problem as you. The only thing is, the text is hard to read. It's similar to the text in your sig, but..it's bold, and..well, just hard to make out. I'm using IE right now, I hate Firefox as well, >_>

FELIPE NO

I am not sure what Opera would call this in English (my interface is Japanese), but go into Options, then the last tab--Advanced or somesuch, and hit Fonts. Set all the "Webpage [x]" fonts to match your Interface Menus font and see if that helps.

Also, force the encoding to ISO-8859-1 on Google's page to see if there is any effect? I know that with Opera it sometimes doesn't pick up the proper encoding for me (such that certain ISO-8859-1 sites won't display some characters, like a quote, properly unless I forced it to this encoding). Most everything else works fine with UTF-8 or Autodetect, though.

I'd guess Opera's using a bizarre font in your web settings. Mine uses Kochi Gothic and Bistream Charter, but...

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

I'm not sure who that was directed to, but this is the problem I get. Here's an example..

http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/2632/11jo1.jpg

Too big, I'll just post it, >_>

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Thanks Neo-gin, but I had tried that already though, and with old versions too to no avail.

Also, it had nothing to do with the encoding.

Thanks guys, but I finally figured it out. Either Adobe Type Manager or having almost 10,000 fonts (because of Font Folio) on my desktop was messing up with the fonts cache or something. I finally Googled the correct terms and linked some other problems I was having but thought it was a completely different issue. For example, sometimes csrss.exe would take massive amounts of CPU... but WTF was it doing? It was doing some font rendering processing or something. This might also be linked to the random Firefox shutdowns but this remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, Opera now works fine, though I did run into some trouble getting the standard WinXP SP2 fonts back (even took me back to the Recovery Console at one point). Sadly, I'm down from almost 10,000 fonts to about 40 now. I had backed up all the fonts though, but I think this time I'll build up my fonts list more slowly.

Now it remains to be seen if this is a permanent fix. What happens when my font collections grows huge again? We shall see.

I'll keep the thread open for inquiries and possible future disasters.

There's nowhere I can't reach.