All file, menu, programe names replace with symbol [A] ...help ?

Hi everyone,
Switched my G4 mac book on yesterday and all file names, menu names and programe names have been replaced with the symbol of an 'A' in a square. Making doing any thing on it near impossible,
The symbol looks a little like this [A] and there is one for each letter of a name that is has replaced.

Any help ?
thanks in advance.
Andy

Is it talking to you as well? (Turn the volume up.)
If so, Voice Over is on. Go to System Preferences > Universal Access and turn it off.

If that's not it, have you Restarted since this appeared? Give that a try.

Are there any other problems, like opening applications? If they open, are they working normally, without the same problem you're reporting?

At a guess I would say somebody has been removing fonts they oughtn't have removed.

Hi thanks for the replies,
my mac was not talking to me, but just to be sure i did go into universal access and checked the settings. When i open applications they work fine except for all menu's are in [A]'s. I have also checked the fonts to make sure none are switched off, as i'm sure i didn't delete any.
It is a puzzling one.

beastie_boy said:

all menu's are in [A]'s

Click to expand...

Ok, maybe it's a Finder issue.
Find your com.apple.finder.plist file and move it to the Desktop.
Mine is in Users/MyUserName/Library/Preferences (Os 10.5.8)
Now Restart.
Did that fix it?

If not, log in under a different user account.
How did that work out?

Tried to find the plist which was harder than i thought as i can't read file of folder names so had to use spotlight to find it, from here i moved it on to the desk top. But moving it using spotlight just seemed to copy it so now have two versions, restarted and but no luck.
Next i created a new account and logged in but that was just the same, all [A]'s

Thanks for the ideas tho,

Yes, I see the problem. I don't know how you got a copy of the file onto your Desktop from Spotlight though.

What happens when you highlight a file in that Preferences folder and right click on it? In my case, the filename is revealed in the contextual menu.

What happens when you highlight a file in that Preferences folder and hit space bar? For me, that invokes QuickLook, and the file name appears at the top of the window.

Perhaps you could find the plist file through one of those (rather tedious) methods. At this point I'm not sure you moved it out of Preferences. If not, restarting did nothing. It's supposed to create a new plist file if there isn't one already.

(On mine, in Icon View, arranged by Kind, with five icons per row, the finder.plist file is down in the 8th row.)