Question

When I'm doing something that needs admin privileges on my OS X Snow Leopard computer, the prompt shows up and works correctly, but the text is unreadable (some special character is repeated instead of "regular" text):

I'm not allowed to post images yet, but you can see a screenshot of the issue here: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/413086/Screen%20shot%202009-11-15%20at%2010.16.37%20PM.png

Any ideas on how I might go about fixing this? So far I've tried rebooting, which did nothing.

Answer 1

That dialog box uses Helvetica. If you have enabled a more complete Helvetica (with additional weights for example) than the one that comes with the OS your font would override the OS's font. A font that contains special characters may not have the alphabet in it, so it would display placeholders like you are seeing. Just disable that Helvetica in your font manager, which you will be able to spot because it will have more variations than Bold, Bold Oblique, Oblique, and Regular—which are the 4 versions of the OS's version. If you don't have a font manager installed, then use Apple's built in one FontBook. There is a button with a check mark on the bottom of the middle column to disable the offending font once you have highlighted it.

If that isn't the case, then it does sound like a font cache issue as mentioned. This can be done from the command line rather than installing any software, and you will need to reboot afterwards:

atsutil databases -remove

Answer 2

This is most likely a font or font cache corruption issue. Onyx can clean up the caches for you, but you'll have to weed out bad fonts yourself. If you've installed Microsoft Office then that's a prime candidate.