PHONETIC.FON

Spent five hours trying to figure out why a webpage produced blank body text viewed with Firefox and Opera on my Windows XP system, but not with Firefox on someone else’s Windows 98 system.

Finally tracked it down to a font-family: fixed style declaration. Fixed seems to be a common Linux font, but on my system, it corresponded to a corrupt 16‐bit bitmap font PHONETIC.FON, which my Fonts control panel called fixed instead of Phonetic. In Character Map, PHONETIC.FON appeared to contain only blank glyphs.

Deleting the corrupt font fixed everything. It was a holdover from Encarta 98, several operating systems ago.