Firefox turned to chinese!

Firefox updated itself to 3.6, on a PC running XP Home, and now some pages display as nothing but chinese character - okay, maybe japanese, but some kind of ideographs, anyway... I could get you a screen shot if it matters. Looking at the page source shows the same kind of thing. At first I thought it was a particular web site, but it was fine on another computer (still FF 3.5.something), and it's also okay in IE 7 on the "bad FF" computer. Then I thought I'd just run through the cleanup procedures here, and when I got to ccleaner... the link from majorgeeks (http://majorgeeks.com/downloadget.php?id=4191&file=9&evp=a12d758b021af1a4f0a6bfe45b0c7a82) does exactly the same thing, although finding a link in google has no problems.

While I continue to clean... does anyone have any ideas about this?

 

Open View then Character Encoding - mine is Western, the first option. I don't know the difference between the three Western styles. You might want to see what the "good" computer has as the selection.
Above I have Auto-Detect set to off; check yours it might be for Chinese, Japanese or Korean

 

Nope - been through that... besides, why would it suddenly change from 3.5.whatever to 3.6?

The stuff is REALLY weird - these are "regular" sites, with images, text, etc. and not remotely asian-language. Click on the link in the previous message. What shows up on the web page is nothing but chinese characters, no highlights, no images, no nothing. The source code is all on one line, same type of stuff.

Thanks for the response - I do appreciate it.

 

I went back and looked through everything in the setup. Going through all the View settings, I switched among the character sets (I usually run UTF-8), and when I went to the Western ISO, the odd sites went back to normal... hurray! Here's the strange thing, though: just for grins, I went back to UTF-8 and still normal; Western Win, still normal; Western Mac, still normal; UTF-16 and bingo, chinese characters. But when I had looked at the View/Character in the first place, it wasn't UTF-16, it was UTF-8. All I can think is that something in the update process flipped a value, and it wasn't until I actively changed the value that it went to the correct one.

The Tools/Options is showing another problem. The "Content" selection doesn't work - when you go to it, there's some disk activity, but nothing happens - the selection you were looking at before (General, Tabs, whatever) still shows.

I'm thinking something bad happened in this update - I'm thinking I'll remove Firefox entirely, clean the registry after that, and then reinstall.