Help! Text is unreadable jibberish.

Hi, I really hope this is the write forum. I tried searching to see if anyone else has had this problem but so far no luck.

I have an iMac and text on some websites, but mainly in my email, turns to absolute jibberish. In order to read it I either have to hit reply or I have to copy and paste it into something like Word or in a new Facebook message.

Here's a screen cap of it. This was a small part of an email my friend typed to me: http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z43/PhotoJenic1/Screenshot2010-07-01at45850PM.png

Does ANYONE know what could be going on? I've owned a MBP for a few years before my iMac and have never had this problem.

I've tried looking through settings to see if anything was set wrong and so far can't figure it out. It's getting increasingly annoying when friends send me an email and I can't read it. I'm at the beginning stage of starting my own photography business and I'm afraid this is going to make it very difficult to email with clients. *rips hair out*

If anyone has any answers or tips I'd be very grateful!

Thanks,
Jen

You may have a corrupt font/font cache.
Download MainMenu 30 day trial, and under the System drop-down click on "Clean Font Caches"
Restart the computer and see if the problem persists.

Instead of MainMenu you can also use Font Finagler

I don't even know how to BEGIN troubleshooting this issue, but I'd be interested to know what worked to fix it. It might happen to me one day

If you have suspects (like the 6 or 7 fonts you know you use) you can run Applications > Font Book : Validate Font and find out if it's "safe". One font at at time only...

Thanks everyone for your replies!

I tried MainMenu and Font Finagler and nothing worked!

I got my Mac from Best Buy, since there's no Apple store in this state, so I'm just going to have to call their Geek Squad and have them drive 2ish hours to get to me. Poor guy.

AHH WAIT!!!

Apparently this is only happening in Safari.

I got an email tonight that came through as jibberish and as I was trying to research more ways to fix this problem I ran into a site that was all jibberish (ironic right?) I went onto FireFox and decided to check that email and sure enough I could read it! Then I went to the jibberish website and I could read it too.

Any ideas?! Maybe delete Safari and reinstall it?

Move the entire fonts folder in YOURUSER>Library>fonts to the desktop and restart Safari.
Visit the site that had the jibberish before and see what it does.

If it is gone… Make a folder called "Fonts" in your library and move the fonts back one or 2 at a time. Each time restarting Safari and rechecking.

If its ONLY Safari that is having this problem, resetting Safari (caution: make a backup of your bookmarks unless you don't care about losing them) should solve the issue. You can do this under the Safari application menu.

You might try setting up a new account and trying Safari there to see if the problem is repeatable. My guess would be no.