[zl9600]

tiger 10.4.2 question:

so i've been trying like anything to find out why my dashboard widget fonts are all skewed (i'm a graphics guy and well it is something i really am having a hard time living with!)

anyway, i thought i would see if my login items were causing the problem, and tried holding down shift key at login. it seems that does the trick: dashboard widgets appear properly. so i took out half of the login items in the user account (font agent pro, version cue, stuffit daemons, itune helper, etc), and even deleted them from the list (i don't understand what 'hide' means)

i logged in normally and alas, the dashboard is back to being screwy.

so, my question is this: what exactly does this holding down shift key at login affect and where could i go through the list to do an isolate & eliminate test to see the offending extension? is there a folder or plist somewhere i can look at to see what's going on?

any help here is appreciated!

[jamil5454]

I believe holding down shift boots you up in safe mode.

[TETENAL]

The question is, what exactly is "safe mode" technically.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107392

Of the above text, the following is particularly interesting:

It disables all fonts other than those in /System/Library/Fonts .

I would say you have a corrupt or incompatible font installed. You can try Font Book->File->Validate Fonts and see whether it finds problems with your fonts. If not you'd have to try to identify the font manually.

[- - e r i k - -]

I found that installing more Helvetica fonts could cause the HTML of the widgets to choose the wrong one (it chose an extended version). Try checking for multiple versions of common fonts.