Notepad .txt files are corrupted.

Hello. For some reason, all of my Notepad files (.txt) have become corrupted. Every letter has been replaced with a capital 'O' in the shape of a vertical rectangle. Numbers, hyphens and forward slashes, characters, etc. are intact. I have no other problems with my computer and use Major Geek recommended protection often.

I am using Windows XP, AVG anti-virus, Windows Defender, Zone Alarm, Spyware Guard, Scotty The Watchdog, Arovax Shield, Start-up Mechanic, Spyware Blaster CallingID and regulary run Adaware, Spybot S&D, A squared, RemoveIT, Remover.exe, Windows Malicious File Remover and CW Shredder.
So, I keep my system pretty safe.

Any ideas as to how this happened and how I can fix it?

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Now this is weird. I just copied and pasted a text file and all of the OOOOOO's turned back into the correct text when I pasted it here. That's good news but what's going on???? (Below was my attempt to show an example:
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Here is an example of a .txt from a aswclnr.log, copied and Pasted:


12/29/2005, 2:21:58 AM
Memory scanning started...
No virus body found in memory.
Memory scanning finished (551.4s).
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Files scanning started...
C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\Perflib_Perfdata_440.dat... file could not be scanned!
C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\ZLT03dbb.TMP... file could not be scanned!
No virus body found.
Files scanning interrupted (5785 files, 0 infected, 450.2s).
Drives scanned: C: (partially)
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Might be Notepad is corrupted. Have you tried to open a txt file in another program like notetab lite (Freeware) for example?

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I downloaded Notetab Lite and was able to copy and paste the unreadable characters from a Note Pad file to new Notetab Lite file. I guess I will have to do that one by one unless I find a fix.

I can't help but wonder how Note Pad became corrupted or how I can fix it.

 

might be some malware or virus, what are you running for security?

 

I am using AVG anti-virus, Windows Defender, Zone Alarm, Spyware Guard, Scotty The Watchdog, Arovax Shield, Start-up Mechanic, Spyware Blaster CallingID and regulary run Adaware, Spybot S&D, A squared, RemoveIT, Remover.exe, Windows Malicious File Remover and CW Shredder.

 

can you do me a favor and run these steps to see if it finds anything. http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407 if they do find something post your results in the malware forum and they will help you fix it. http://forums.majorgeeks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=35

 

HI!
It may be the font selected in Note Pad...have you checked by selecting 'Format'-'Font' in Note Pad's Toolbar to see what font is selected?
If it's a 'symbol' font it will display correctly in Notepad, but when copied and pasted it will be a TTF-true type font. The font in the pic is the alphabet in 'MT Extra' and it displays like the pic in Note Pad, but when copied from Notepad and pasted here it is in a TTF:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Just something to check.

If that's the case you can just change it to Arial or whatever.

 

You did it!!!!!!! That was the problem. It was on 'Shruti Font'. My guess is that my daughter messed around with the font. I forgot Notepad even had that feature.
Thanks a lot. I appreciate your time and help.

Thanks to everyone else that took time out to help as well!

 

You are most welcome!
Glad it worked out for you!

 

Hi again Tex,
Glad its all sorted out. However don't forget to have a serious play with notetab. Its got a squillion goodies attached to it over and above the wimpy notepad and as a text editor I find it up there with the best of all text editors.
Cheers
Robert