mac osx 10.4.11 Font appearances

I am using an older mac at work and have forgotten how to switch font appearces.
Over the holidays, some how a lot of websites and emails come in using a bizzare random
font from the font book... How can I correct this? Please ignore any misspellings
as I am struggling to even read my own post...attached is the screencap of what im dealing with.... I have tried switching the fonts in both Mail & safari and nothing seems to switch it to a legible font...Any help is very appreciated.

Safari > Preferences.. > Appearance

Select your preferred fonts.

Mail? I don't use it.

wow...

using the preferences It was listed as times & courier when I changed it nothing happened even after a restart... I even trashed my preferences for safari before the reset...
& it still looks like this. Any Ideas?

pic

thanks...

Does your System Preferences have a pane for Languages? Mine doesn't, but I think later versions of OSX have it. Perhaps the answer is in there.

I would also look in Font book to see what characters are showing in those fonts. It may be that the font files are messed up.

What is likely to be happening is that JD either recently deleted, renamed or moved some fonts, or used a program such as Monolingual and went overboard on removing languages. The system looks to be defaulting to Cuneifont to make up for a missing or damaged system font.