Adobe Flash text broken: see only descenders

Wow, thanks for the prompt reply, BD.

I have tried changing my font preferences to no avail. But I didn't think of a font conflict. I will try running with only the basic System fonts and see if that helps.

Film at 11!

Ah me. This may be one of those things that turn out not to be worth the effort. I've disabled all except the System>Library>Fonts fonts :
Courier.dfont
Geneva.dfont
Keyboard.dfont
LastResort.dfont
LucidaGrande.dfont
Monaco.dfont

Now the problem is even worse. The pages I use to test "Flash font screwiness" are
1. http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/waters/timeline/index.html (just because it shows two problems:
1a. The main text of the timeline and Category areas
1b. The cutoff heading in the item box that appears when a map item is clicked)

2. http://maps.google.com/ Streetview of anyplace
2a. There is supposed to be text showing in Streetview, and I see only little blank boxes.

I've just been to both pages on my dear wife's old Macbook and they work fine. Beautifully, even. And both Firefox and Safari show the broken text on my G5. So you're right, I have some kind of buggy font business going on. Blah. I suppose I need to reload my System fonts, to begin with. I don't even remember where to get clean copies. Maybe my original old Install discs?

I'd really hate to have to attempt to rebuild this System! The Install on the discs is 10.3.5, and I can't say whatall has been added in the way of plugins and such.

Thank you, DB, for giving me direction. I wonder, though, if this is a font problem per se? NONE of the fonts I'm trying render these Flash pages correctly *on my machine.* But, and this could be a big caveat, I don't see problems with fonts in other applications. All my Adobe Creative Suite applications seem fine. PDFs display fine. The Finder is fine. Text renders perfectly well on web pages such as this one. It's only on Flash enabled web pages I have this problem.

I guess it's possible some System font is playing havoc with Flash, but I don't really see how, when they don't seem to create any other problems. Or at least, any problems I've noticed. Odd.

Has anyone seen my Flash problem before?

OK, on the off chance some other poor old fashioned benighted soul might read this, the question is answered, thusly...

1. I may have had some corrupt font(s). I don't think so. But, as there were some other kind of odd things going on, I reinstalled my operating system. Used the Archive function, saved all my bookmarks, etc. successfully.

2. After reinstalling, all my test pages worked perfectly. I saw text, and in particular fonts, I'd never seen before! Totally cool.

3. I rarely use the Apple supplied fonts, and like to have my own sets of client fonts set up. In the course of disabling the Apple installed fonts, I discovered what I'm pretty sure was my original problem. All of the Flash web pages apparently expect to see very specific fonts. Such as Times (family) in Postscript. Not Open Type. Maybe even Verdana on one of them.
So, I'm pretty sure the problem all along was just not having the very specific font(s) required by the various Flash based pages installed. Am I stupid or what?
I suppose being accustomed to having Firefox and Safari do a good job of picking, choosing and substituting fonts on web pages led me to think Flash would be able to do the same. But no. And, the stupid Flash pages never put up any warning or complaint about missing fonts. They just sullenly refused to work correctly. Ah me.

Thank you, DB, for getting me going in the right direction! Life is now good and I'm off to update my System.