OK, first I checked the OS fonts folder. Yes wingdings, winding's 2 and winding's 3 are installed so I copied all the fonts from my Win7 fonts folder into the WinX fonts folder, and skipped the duplicates already there. Except for Global Space, which the OS din't recognize as font (more on this later). Bottom line, the weird characters did NOT go away, so we can assume that its not fonts.