Vista - Strange characters appear in DOS window using PING command

Hi
I have suffered some sort of system failure on my XPpro machine - the blue
screen of death! It would get to the login screen, go blue then reboot. I
first removed and swapped memory and video cards etc, to no avail. I then
tried a disk check from safe mode with both options ticked, reboot and let it
go. Still same problem when starting normally. I have a RAID 0 (mirror only)
and had to remove the IDE card and place one drive directly into the
motherboard to re-install windows over itself. It seems to be okay (mostly!)
once again and when I am happy with this repair I will re-establish the RAID
0.

In testing connectivity, I pinged 127.0.0.1 from a command promt and this
worked except that it displayed "Pinging oÿ with 32 bytes of data". (the "o"
is in superscript and my machine is named HOME1.) It gives the same result if
I ping my Vista machine on 192.168.0.5 or by its name. I have done a full
disk check since recovering and the machine seems to be doing everything else
properly.

I don't get it as this machine has been rock-solid stable and reliable for
at least 2 years.

So my questions are: Will I have to perform a full installation and blow
away all of my setup that has many useful programs and utilities installed?
Is there a way of correcting this anomaly without taking such a drastic
measure? Should I care that I am getting wierd characters in a DOS prompt?

Many thanks in advance
Darth_Lager

neat...right click on the top bar of a command window and choose PROPERTIES.

Go to the FONT window....what is the selected font?


"Darth_Lager" <Darth_Lager@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:3E7FB95E-0862-497F-ACD5-ABA2E27266AC@xxxxxx