need to restore fonts

Hi all... I recently used CCleaner on several of my machines and it has worked great up until now... somehow, after the last cleaning, the fonts in any Windows XP related box have been removed... I type in passwords and instead of asterisks, I get squares... all of the words are now the same squares in any Windows notification... I even went into control panel and when it opens up, I cannot read ANYTHING... I am a bit freaked out right now... I am computer literate and know enough to be dangerous, but really am frustrated right now... can anyone help me with a step by step process to maybe help me go back to a restore point, or back to re-active some of the registry stuff which might have been removed in error??? Thanks so much. Ron

PS: I have Windows XP Pro and IE8, which has caused other issues ugh...

Have you tryed a normal system restore?

Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click System Restore. System Restore starts.

On the Welcome to System Restore page, click Restore my computer to an earlier time (if it is not already selected), and then click Next.

Then select a point when it was last good.

failing that did you back up the registry?

are you using a different language than english, possibly some unicode language? in many cases, square is caused by the incapability of rendering unicode fonts under non-unicode locale.