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SOLVED - No Text and Tiny Tabs in Windows Task Manager

This fix was done on Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit

Problem

My customer was complaining that certain websites were displaying incorrectly, when I looked at the task manager I found that it was not showing any fonts and all the tabs were really small. The customer claimed the problem had first started after installing one of the apple updates, quicktime I think, but I suspect there may have been windows updates happening at the same time.

Solution

I solved this with a system restore in the end but it wasn't completely straightforward. The system restore took abnormally long to complete and I got a message at the end saying it had been unsuccessful. However, the tabs were now back to normal. Everything was running super slow though and I tried to go online to check out the problem websites but internet explorer kept crashing.

The next thing I did was to do a quick check disk. I used the disk check facility on a Norton Ghost boot disk just because the laptop was running so slowly at this stage that I couldn't be bothered to wait for the windows utility to start up. Had I had the patience I am sure that it would have had the same effect. The disk scan completed and showed a few fixes, the usual stuff, indexing errors etc. I went to start up and it struggled to boot, got past the windows logo and then just blank screen and mouse pointer.

At this stage I decided to bring the laptop back to my workshop and run a full disk scan with surface check. This time the process was successful and it has fixed the problem. It found no bad sectors so the disk seems to be fine and the laptop is running at a reasonable speed. Again, I used the Norton Ghost boot disk for the disk scan, although other boot disks have the same utility. If you dont have a boot disk you may want to try putting the disk in another computer as a slave drive and running a scan disk from that one. Incase you dont know, this is done by selecting the drive you want to check, right click and choosing 'Properties' then 'Tools' then 'Check Now'. Ensure that both 'Automatically fix file system errors' and 'Scan for and attempt recovery of bad secors' are checked. It can take well over an hour on many computers.

I hope this is of some help to someone. Thanks, Ste Edgoose