Problem: Fonts Appear Faded

My computer is an HP Pavilion with two 3.0 GHz processors one gig of ram and a 260 gig hard drive and a 160 gig hard drive and a flat screen LCD monitor. I am running Windows XP Media Edition 2002 with Service Pack 2. Since this is my first technical post I do hope that is enough system information. Please inform me if it isn't.

My problem is a strange one and anyone I have asked has said they have never heard of such a thing. My problem is this: It seems that my font's look funny like parts are faded. They are not sharp and solid like they should be. It is more obvious when viewing a bold font. Also, it does not appear to affect the one game that I play (Bejeweled 2) but other than that it appears that every program is affected.

I thought that it might be a corrupted video driver so I downloaded the most recent one from the manufacturer and it did nothing to solve this issue. Also, I did try to see if the 'Smooth font edges' option (I think that is in the folder or IE options menu) and that did not work either.

I have, oddly enough, had this problem before and the only way that I fixed it was to reinstall Windows which I do not want to do if it isn't necessary. Has anyone seen this problem before? How do I go about fixing it?

 

The screen resolution is 1024 x 768.

Your suggestion about changing the effects seems to have worked. It was set to Standard and I changed it to Cleartype and they look like what I am used to.

I thank you for your time.

Now I can move on to different problems with my new system.