bizarre character in Standard Digits

Hi, I have a really odd issue where a vertical bar appears in all paths in explorer, on the system clock and explorer date/time stamps.
you can see examples below. I've reset my regional settings, and checked the registry for standard digits, sNativeDigits, but all looks ok. in Customize format for digits, I have an odd character before '0' but it is not present in the registry.
does anyone know how to get rid of these lines, character?
many thanks for your time
Pete

When did the issue begin and what was the last change to the system prior to that?

Try a system restore point before the event.

Hi, yes I have tried Reset, fixes nothing. AMD GPU drivers are up to date.
I would restore to an earlier date, if I had restore points.. they are set on, but with 0% available. joy. must have happened when I upgraded my ssd a while ago.
I cannot honestly remember when it started.. its one of those annoyances, "I'll live with it, maybe it will go away, ok, now I need to look into it", type things..
other options in the Standard Digits drop down all have 10 digits, but English has 11, with the weird character before 0.
any other options/thoughts?
cheers
Pete

Hi, so I have already ran the sfc /scannow.. it repaired some files.. upon a reboot, nothing changed. however, this is where is get really weird, in a good way. last night, before doing anything, I did a backup using Acronis 2016.. then I ran ccleaner (which I never use, since in my experience it breaks more than it fixes) and surprise, surprise nothing got fixed.. then I started faffing with keyboard and language settings.. anyway, notepad started crashing whenever I typed anything, MS word repaired itself, and my keyboard was stuck on US settings (@ and " where transposed) Grrrr. I was getting grumpy now so I decided to restore to my pre-ccleaner backup. Acrons crashed and could not find the backup.. ok.. sleep on it.. this morning, tried again, failed, repeatedly trying different options until Acronis deleted the C: partition. I had asked it to recover the partition not the disk, but it crashed.. and wiped the partition. diskpart showed me an empty partition. no knowing if the data was recoverable (bloody Acronis) I decided my last hope was to find an Acronis 2016 boot ISO and manually find the backup and restore.. after I exited the other end of that rabbit hole, I started a recovery.. ..which worked! yay! and now for the weird part. I had had this weird issue with the weird lines for weeks, and it was certainly evident before I took the backup, since that was why I took the backup, in case I made things worse.. and now the lines are gone. that icon on the Standard Digits has gone, and all is good.. so I look at my backup and I see that the backup I restored from was April.. not June.. sometimes I am an idiot. but the problem is gone now and I'm happy with that result. I guess I now need to keep an eye on when it comes back, if it comes back, what caused it.. anyway, thanks everyone for taking the time to respond. it warms my heart that there are people out there who take the time to reply and try to help people.. cheers and good night

Doesn't CCleaner have a rollback mechanism, i.e. doesn't it save the changes as reg file you can restore if required?
I have to say I gave up on Acronis as it's become a piece of crap, try Macrium (there's a free version available too)

yeah, I saved the registry for recovery, but by the time I thought of that I had already gone too far down the path of no return.. funny, I tried to clone my old ssd to the new ssd using Acronis and had horrible results; used Marcim Reflect and it worked perfectly. I think I may ditch Acronis; it is way too buggy and bloated..