Punctuation on Web pages showing up as ASCII characters!

After 5 years using Win98SE, TrueType fonts, and never having any display problems, lately the display is substituting various symbols such as: a small box in place of an apostrophe, or a capital A with a French accent above it for a semicolon, etc. Is there a simple fix? Thanks...

 

First thing that comes to mind is IE's toolbar>view>encoding....make sure this is set for "western european iso "

 

Yep, it is.

I still can't find anything else leading to the cause...... anyone else?

 

The first thing I always do with a 9X system that starts doing strange, one-off things is a total cleanup.

After the usual dumping of temp internet files, temp files, any files in C:\ with the filennnn.chk pattern (where nnnn is any number) and dumping the recycle bin and since it's a web problem mainly, run Ad-aware and Spybot with the latest updates. Then,

Boot to DOS and do
scanreg /fix followed by
scanreg /opt (and yes, I know that in theory you can do both at once but it seems better with two runs)
scandisk /surface /autofix /nosave

Then shut down and remove/reseat the video board if it's in a slot and boot back to the GUI to do a scandisk (long file name problems that the DOS version can't see) and a defrag.

If you still have issues, try reloading the video drivers.