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Last week I installed Win XP for a friend and in that one short week he has managed to hose his fonts by trying to drag some fonts in and some out. Now wingdings have run amuck. Radio buttons, pulldown menu 'right arrows' (indicating an expanding entry) and few others I do not remember all all corrupted. They were and are wingdings, but they are now the wrong wingdings, e.g. the right arrows on pull down menus are now mouses. I've tried uninstalling wingdings, but the OS won't let me. Anybody have any ideas? Thanks in advance for assistance!

Do you mean wingdings or widgets? It sounds like you're describing graphical elements, not fonts. Can you elaborate?

Yes, I believe they are wingdings. And they are 'graphical elements' - the elements used mostly in menus. But I'm pretty sure they come from the font 'wingdings'. The correct ones are there in the font, but so are the ones appearing now - the wrong ones.

Try copying all of the default fonts from another XP box to your friend's box.

Thanks. Any suggestions on how to uninstall/overwrite the existing ones? XP hasn't been letting me do either so far.

I knew I forgot something!

What you need to do is copy the files while that XP installation isn't running. There are several possible ways to do this:

1. If your boot partition is FAT, you can use a boot diskette, and copy the files as you would in DOS.

2. I use ERD Commander, from Winternals. It's sorta pricey, though.

3. You can try the recovery console. It's limited in what it can do, so I'm not sure if it will let you copy files into the fonts directory. But it's free, and therefore worth a try.

4. You can install Windows on another partition. This is the official Microsoft way to do it, and it's a pain. It's most likely to work though.

No matter which way you do it, start off with the new fonts in an easily accessible directory, like C:\FONTS or something like that.

Is the user ID your logged in with a member of that PCs local admin group. NT/2000/XP is picky about that when changing things in the system folder. You can change that setting under 'Users' in the control panel. At least that's where I recall it. Don't have XP in front of me to verify. I just remember that it is in a different location in XP as opposed to other OSs.