When all text becomes lines or gray blobs

Has there been a thread about when all text on tabs, chat history, chat, etc become lines sorta like small bar code? I tried to search but must not have the correct keyword.

Anyway that happened when I was in SL this morning. When I quit and reconnected, all was well and the problem has not reoccurred again so far.

Sounds like you were seeing ancient mole characters. I thought those had been relegated to -20m along with the other artifacts.

Ancient moles? o.O

I would like to state that I, too, have seen the "bar code problem" many times.

So the only way to recover from the "ancient mole characters", is quit and connect again?

Does anyone know what causes this to happen?

This is probably not the same thing so I almost didn't mention it but anything's possible so...

I know someone who has a translator program to be able to type in english and have it come up on the screen in Thai. A few times he's hit some wrong key somewhere and I'm not sure why but suddenly everything he types in SL will come up as simple lines instead (looks like this ------------ ) Because he can't remember the key command to switch it back he has to log out and log back in again to make it stop.

Not sure if that helps or has no relevance at all but... *shrugs*

That used to happen on my old laptop occasionally. 2 causes that I found.

First was my graphics card was not supported although I was able to eventually twek SL settings so that I could at least function and read.

Second was heat. When the laptop got overheated it would do that.