Fonts all wacky in one user account

In every program--browsers, Word, Notepad, whatever--the letters are so skinny you can hardly read them sometimes--but only recently, and in one user account. My Admin account is okay. I have compared dpi settings and every single desktop setting by taking screenshots of the good configuration settings and comparing them in the other account: they are identical. In the browsers, like Firefox, the content settings are identical. I uninstalled and reinstalled the browsers: no effect. For testing, I created a new user account, and all the fonts are okay in it. I have run sfc, chkdsk, even the update readiness tool which MS support says will sometimes fix corrupted files. I even ran my most recent video driver update in the admin account and in the user account: no effect. What is going on?

If the problem started just recently, I would do a system restore. If that is not possible. I would open a new user account and close the problem.

The fact that the new account does not have that issue certainly makes that option reasonable, and in fact, I started to do it by first renaming my original user account, but it wouldn't then let me create a new account with the original name, although there were then two different George folders in Users, the second a George_2, so I began to worry about Vista confusing things. In other words, I had renamed it, but My Docs were still in the original George folder, and there was no folder with the new name. When I deleted the new account and undid the renaming, I noticed some glitches, like Carbonite thinking that my 100+ GB of file backups were gone (reinstalling it fixed that). Unfortunately, I do not have any restore points before the problem started, although I can get system restore to work. It rarely works from the user account, but it almost always works from a safe mode command prompt (or Vista DVD or Ghost CD command prompt.)

I will no doubt end up having to fix it via a new account, but I am interested intellectually in WHY it is doing that. I started to contact MS, since I have a real version of Vista, but their site says that my free tech support has expired, which is strange, since I bought the Vista Ultimate SP1 DVDs less than a year ago. I have considered using Windows Easy Transfer to switch stuff from the old user account to the new, but I have a funny feeling that whatever is causing the problem is some kind of setting that will also transfer over. Thinking back, though, I remember noticing some problems several weeks ago with a program called Screen Print, which I have used in various incarnations for 8 years. The screen shots or window shots I was getting from it had suddenly started being distorted and low quality using settings that, in all those years, I had never touched.