Serious font problem in my PC

[alegator]

One day I noticed that certain features of my PC would suffer from very small fonts to the point of being unreadable. I don't know what caused this. An example of the issue is when I go to Administrative Tools/Services, when I highlight a service in the list, the corresponding Service description shows with very small fonts as shown below:

Other areas of Windows also suffer from this, for example when in WLM I want to open the chat log Live Plus feature) for a given contact the font is so small that it is unreadable, same thing with "View the complete history" that is included in the WLM chat window.
How can I fix this? Thanks

[redwudz]

You can change the default font size. One guide: http://www.xp-tips.com/change-font-size.shtml

[alegator]

You can change the default font size. One guide: http://www.xp-tips.com/change-font-size.shtml

redwdz, I know how to change those font sizes but the issue arises selectively in certain areas of Windows as stated in my post, the rest of the PC is behaving normally, so it does not solve the issue. Thanks anyway.

[jagabo]

redwdz, I know how to change those font sizes but the issue arises selectively in certain areas of Windows as stated in my post, the rest of the PC is behaving normally, so it does not solve the issue. Thanks anyway.

The Advanced Appearance dialog has several font settings you can change. One for menus, one for window title bars, one for message boxes, one for icon text, etc. It's likely that one of those has been changed to a small font. The one that controls the services descriptions is "Icon". That also controls icon text labels and several other components in Windows.

[alegator]

redwdz, I know how to change those font sizes but the issue arises selectively in certain areas of Windows as stated in my post, the rest of the PC is behaving normally, so it does not solve the issue. Thanks anyway.

The Advanced Appearance dialog has several font settings you can change. One for menus, one for window title bars, one for message boxes, one for icon text, etc. It's likely that one of those has been changed to a small font. The one that controls the services descriptions is "Icon". That also controls icon text labels and several other components in Windows.

jagabo, the icons in my desktop look normal and healthy (default windows settings), there's no reason to change them. I looked up the "Icon" settings, it's set to Tacoma, font size 8. Here's a sample of how my icons look in my desktop (1600x1200 screen). Nevertheless I tried changing to a font 10 for example, icons look awful and no change to the small fonts seen in the areas described by my post

[jagabo]

Odd. Changing the icon font changes the services description text (along with lots of other text) on my system (XP Pro, SP3).

[usually_quiet]

It worked for me too, though I had to increase the font size to 12 for it to be readily apparent. You'd think it would be the "Window" setting in The Advanced Appearance dialog, but that's disabled. Thanks!

I will have to mention this to my brother-in-law. He has his monitor set to 800x600 resolution to get larger text sizes inside various windows.

I spoke too soon. It didn't change the text inside the blue "Appearance and Themes" window, but sure it will still help him. I'll experiment a little and see if anything else will.

[alegator]

Well, finally solved this issue after months of living with it. I googled and found a site with useful hints to repair fonts in windows. I applied approach#3 in the link below:
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/how-to-fix-windows-xp-font-problems.html
Now all the locations mentioned in my post display normal fonts. Here is a screenshot of the Services description window after the repair:

[jagabo]

I will have to mention this to my brother-in-law. He has his monitor set to 800x600 resolution to get larger text sizes inside various windows.

Changing font sizes can cause problems. Some dialog boxes assume certain sized fonts. Some text will not be visible because it spills outside the dialog. Sometimes the "Cancel" and "OK" buttons aren't visible because their position is calculated based on the font size. A bigger font causes them to be outside the dialog box so they aren't rendered.

An easier way to globally change the font size is to change the DPI setting. Instead of the normal 96 DPI use a higher value to get bigger fonts. Display Properties -> Settings tab -> Advanced button -> General tab -> DPI Setting.