Hi,
I am praying someone can help me with what is - without exaggeration - the weirdest problem I have encountered on a PC in 30 years of using them professionally, and I cannot help suspecting may be a virus, even though Norton does not detect any problem.
I have an XP machine on which some pairs of characters have suddenly stopped printing. I have been doing some investigating, and have discovered the following so far:
- At the moment, only the Calibri font seems to be affected.
- All sizes of font and all styles (bold, italic, etc.) are affected.
- So far, 3 character combinations appear to be affected 'ti' and 'fk' and 'fj'; the uppercase versions of these are fine. I have completely reinstalled XP on a cleanly formatted hard disk, and the problem is still present. I even used fixmbr to rewrite the Master Boot Record, as I suspected a virus may be lurking there. I also used a free tool by Kaspersky, intended to remove rootkit viruses.
- The letters appear okay on the screen in both Word 2010 and Wordpad.
- The letters fail to print from both these applications, regardless of print settings.
- If I print to the Bullzip PDF printer from Word, the characters appear fine in the resulting PDF document.
- If I take the document created on the faulty XP machine to a Windows 7 machine attached to the same printer, it prints fine.
- If I create a document on Word 2010 on my Windows 7 machine and then take this to the faulty XP machine, the letter combinations do not print.
This behaviour seems so specific to me that is surely has to be a virus (though I have always had anti-virus software installed). My printer, a Canon iP4600, I believe, prints all documents as bitmaps, so it should not even be aware of the concept of character combinations (if I am wrong, please correct me).
This thing is causing me to lose what remaining hair I have. Any help or advice where I can go with this next would be very much appreciated.
Kind wishes, Patrick