Lost my Special Characters

Before I was forced to format my HD I was able to use and view special characters within SL, ie: hearts etc, using them via my character map. But since the forced formatting etc I can not . All I am able to see now is *** which replaces these special characters.

I run XP home sp2, updated fully.
IE7.

I have no idea how I manage to use them before, one day they suddenly appeared in SL.

Can anyone know how I can get it back pleeeeeeease

ty in adavance.

Hi Papillon, I think you may be using a different font to that you had before? I'm not in-world but believe there may be a dialogue box to select font among Properties.

Thanks replying to my cry for help.

I went inworld and looked through everything in preferences but for the life of me I can not see anything you have suggested. I've also looked through my menues and nothing jumps out as obvious to me.

I've also noticed I was able to view these special charcters in this forum, but now I can not. Which makes me think it's something missing from my puter.
I was able to see Korean Characters before, but now they are just row of boxes.

*sighs*

any other suggestions ?????????

Ummm .. other option that occurs to me since you did a complete reinstall is ... have you selected the correct keyboard language? You should be able to find the option for that under the OS Control Panel rather than in SL. This would I understand send different codes for key presses.

you may simply have to do a hard download of non-standard fonts again.

control panel > regional language options > languages tab > install files for east asian languages