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.

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?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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.

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

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.

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