Wingdings on Window Screen

My son just turned on his vomputer and he has Windows XP and all the icons have symbol font under them. He has tried to change the settings but cant navigate anywhere because its all in symbol language. How can I change it back to English? How could this happen?
Thanks

 

Dispaly Properties right click on open space on desktop then go to properties it is the last option starting from the top. Try ching desktop theme of appearences.

 

Sircomp=
We tried this but even the properties are in what we think are Wingdings. So we can't read them. Any other suggestions? Is the computer totally messed up? He has done Adaware right before this happened - the night before and then the next morning nothing was in English!
Thanks again for any help you can give us!

 

We even tried a Systems Restore and still the Symbols instaed of English everywhere. Can anyone help us?

 

Click start/run

Type: SFC /scannow

Note the space between SFC and /

keep your xp cd handy in case you're asked to chuck it into your cd rom then just follow along

 

This is difficult to do since everything is in this symbol language. We did Open
SFC /scannow but we cannot understands what it says to do next in this symbol language. Help!

 

Do you have another computer for comparison purposes,what I mean is,if I tell you what you need to do,can you follow the steps on another machine,keep track of what you did and do the same on your sons machine?If so,do this:

start/control panel/Regional and language options,click on the advanced tab(the third one),there is a dropdown list,click on it and count down from the top, to the 25th entry,highlight it,go to the bottom of the box and click apply(the button on the right)

Let me know what happens

 

My other computer has Windows 98 so the setting are different. My son is givng up - he is just going to reformat with the original Windows disk. Unfortunately, he says he will lose all of his data on the machine other than he made a back-up of his Word Documents. Thanks for trying to help.

 

If you want I can email a series of screenshots that you can follow

 

I'm having this same exact problem! Can you please offer a solution??