Strange font substitution

Hi there,
I am using a MacBook Pro with OSX 10.5.2. It has suddenly started to have problems with the fonts in fontbook and also doing some very strange font substitutions.
Instead of showing text normally it is replacing it with random characters. You can kind of read it but it's not real letters. I have a screenshot of it but don't know how to post the image on here.
This substitution is happening in Mail, Preview and Safari, so seems to be with native OS X software.
Any ideas?

Hi Simon,
Have you gone to FontBook and resolved duplicates?
Create a new account, name it "test" and see how your fonts work in that User acct? (That will tell where your font issue is coming from - whether it's in your Home fonts folder or a system fonts folder) This account is just for test, do nothing further with it.
Open System Preferences >> Accounts >> "+" make it an admin account. Check your fonts in that account and let us know the result.
Also, have you disabled Helvetica Fractions, Helvetica Neue and Times Phonetic, if you have them? They are known troublemakers.
Here is a user tip by Kurt Lang that lists all necessary system fonts and their locations. Also installed fonts and their font folders and loacation from Apple.
-mj
Message was edited by: macjack

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