Saturday 4 June 2011

Firefox Showing Garbled Characters Fix

Here is a quick tip describing how to fix an unusual (but frustrating) problem which sometimes happens in Firefox. The problem results in the font of all the menu items and some fonts on web pages to be totally garbaled and unreadable as so:

Take the following steps to fix this problem (Note this was performed on a Windows 7 PC, other platform solutions may differ):

  1. Ensure Firefox is closed
  2. On the 'Start' search/run bar, type: 'services.msc'
  3. From the list of services, find 'Windows Font Cache Service'
  4. Right click this service and select 'Stop'
  5. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to: 'C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local' (you will have to be an admin user to view this directory
  6. Locate and DELETE any font-cache .DAT files in this directory
  7. Restart the 'Windows Font Cache' Service (Right-click and Start)
  8. Open Firefox and  the garbled funny characters problem should now be fixed!
Hope this helps! Comment below :-)

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