Words display as boxes with As in them

This happened on another computer, and reinstalling the operating system solved that. Now it's my coworker's laptop where this is happening. He says he "uninstalled a game" and now all the error messages and the login screen words all display as special characters- the letter A in a square.
I reinstalled 10.6.3 and that solved the problem. But after installing the last round of updates to the OS, the words started displaying as these special characters again.
I reinstalled 10.6.3 again and again it seemed to be fixed. I did NOT install any updates but I did install antivirus software and, there it was again, the lack of legible words.
What can I do to fix this? Is it a font repair issue? Do I reinstall a third time and cross my fingers?

The letter A surrounded by a rounded corner square is produced by the system font LastResort.ttf. This can indicate a few things:
1) The main system font Lucida Grande is damaged.
2) The font cache files are so badly damaged, that the system is degrading to Last Resort for glyphs.
As you discovered, reinstalling the OS fixes the issue. That for two reasons. All fresh copies of the fonts supplied by OS X are installed, and all cache files currently on the drive are removed.
This is likely overkill though to fix the issue. Do this:
1) Close all running applications. From an administrator account, open the Terminal app and enter the following command. You can also copy/paste it from here into the Terminal window:
sudo atsutil databases -remove
This removes all font cache files. Both for the system and all user font cache files. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.
If that alone doesn't do it, or the symptoms come back quickly, then the fonts are probably damaged. You can reinstall just the fonts OS X comes with (all, or selectively) from the OS X installation DVD. Follow the directions at the bottom of Font Management in OS X.
After replacing the fonts, clear the font cache files again to ensure they are built from undamaged fonts.
The link, or one of the links above directs you to my personal web site. While the information is free, it does ask for a contribution. As such, I am required by Apple's rules for these discussions to include the following disclaimer.
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.
Edit: I must be typing really slow today.

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I just updated to 10.8.4 and my mail program is showing a series of boxes with AAAAs inside them instead of the email addresses. Also when on Safari web pages are displaying the same AAAAAs instead of type. Firefox displays fine. Can someone help me?

I just updated to 10.8.4 and my mail program is showing a series of boxes with AAAAs inside them instead of the email addresses. Also when on Safari web pages are displaying the same AAAAAs instead of type. Firefox displays fine. Can someone help me?

Restart your Mac and immediately hold down the Shift key when you hear the startup chime to boot into Safe Mode. Keep holding the Shift key until you see a progress bar towards the bottom of the screen. You can let go of the Shift key at that point.
OS X asks you to log in (you will get this screen on a Safe Mode boot even if your Mac is set to automatically log in). Let the Mac finish booting to the desktop and then restart normally. This will clear Font Book's database and the cache files of the user account you logged into in Safe Mode.
Next, close all running applications. From an administrator account, open the Terminal app and enter the following command. You can also copy/paste it from here into the Terminal window:
sudo atsutil databases -remove
Terminal will then ask for your admin password. As you type, it will not show anything, so be sure to enter it correctly.
This removes all font cache files. Both for the system and the current user font cache files. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.

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Despite trying different encodings, such as GBK and GB18030, nothing is able to properly display Chinese simplified characters. I have IE as well, and it is able to display both S and T Chinese pages without a problem like Firefox before 4.0b7. I'm using English version of FF with 64bit Windows 7.

The boxes with little numbers mean that Firefox is now unable to find a font which supports the characters in question. (It's nothing to do with the character set detection.) This could either be because the fonts have been removed from your computer (unlikely, if IE can find them), or perhaps because the website has changed to ask for fonts you don't actually have, or perhaps it's serving different pages to different versions of Firefox. Were you on 4.0b6 before, or 3.6.x?
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Try to set the pref gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.use_gdi_table_loading to false on the about:config page.
To open the about:config page, type about:config in the location (address) bar and press the "Enter" key, just like you type the url of a website to open a website. 
If you see a warning then you can confirm that you want to access that page. 
*Use the Filter bar at to top of the about:config page to locate a preference more easily.
*Preferences that have been modified show as bold(user set).
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Safari showing text as boxes with A in them after upgrade to OSX lion

Hi,
After upgrading to OSX Lion and the new Safari that comes with it 6.0. It is showing a lot of the charachters on some websites as a box with a capital A in them. These are then pastered all over the site.
If i go to other browsers it is fine. Also when i copy and paste these A boxes it to the search bar it shows the correct text. But when viewing the page it is impossible to view the text and makes for an unpleasant browsing experience.
Any idea how to fix this issue? Is it a font issue? I have not changed any of my fonts and I would assume that the browser would be using a standard web font.
Any help on solving this riddle would be appreciated.
Thank you.

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Within a container section, I have enclosed text with DIV
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Hi,
I am coming up the learning curve with Dreamweaver CS3.
Within a container section, I have enclosed text with DIV
tags, creating a CSS ID to add color to the background, and then
applied other class styles to the text. Result is that now the text
is enclosed by the background color applied to the CSS ID box.
What can you do to tighten-up the box around the text? Tried
playing with the BOX properties but the background shrinks leaving
white space between the BOX area and adjacent DIVs (how do get rid
of the white space??) and the text stays in the same spot, the box
showing sometimes only partial text.
What I want is to create is rows of links/text, each row with
a different colored background, the box tightly wrapped around the
text, and no white space between the boxes. How do I do that?
Help is greatly appreciated, as a newbie I can get 90% there
but the finer details still escape me. Thanks for your help.

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The code is in composition ready. Click the filled {}

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Back up all data.
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Mac 101: Font Book
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Scott,
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Words display as boxes with As in them

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