[cnelson87]

don't know why this happened... suddenly, letters from file names and folders just disappear leaving blank spaces in their place. not just in the finder, but in application dialog windows, too. it does no good to type over the blank spaces, they stay blank.
rebooted, all is well. weird.

[Millennium]

That definitely sounds strange. Do you have a screenshot that you could post?

[cnelson87]

nope, I should have done that. I rebooted and it hasn't happened since.

[Detrius]

From the short description, it sounds like a corrupt Font cache to me. If you go to versiontracker.com and search for font cache cleaner, you should find some freeware apps to do just that.

[Dr. Smoke]

Originally posted by Detrius:
...search for font cache cleaner...

An excellent tool for cleaning a corrupted font cache is Font Finagler.