Oncreen text is all capital A's in boxes on my MacBook Pro?

Sounds like your system has gotten corrupt. You need to repair your hard drive with Disk Utility, and then if that is successful, reinstall your system. If you are using Mac OS X 10.6 or later, you can install right on top of the existing system without affecting your data, though of course problems can happen in cases where things have gotten corrupt, so you would be wise to back up all your data immediately, if it isn't already backed up.

For more information, see:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2570

See:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20058476-263.html

The problem of A's is boxes comes from a font conflict or duplicate. I would open up your Font Book app in you main Applications folder, and check. Look really carefully at your Geneva (click the triangle down for that font so you can see ALL of the versions of Geneva.

Did you recently add new free fonts?

Also, are you on 10.6.8? Or a higher version?

The As in boxes are a symptom of font problems, of which moving Geneva to the trash is one possible cause. However, you were having other issues, from your description, before any of the font problems popped up. You've really got to figure out how to back up your data and then reinstall the system. If you're having trouble with that, perhaps you should make an appointment at the Genius Bar at your nearest Apple Store and have them help you out.

Well,, I wish we knew exactly which OS you're on. If it's 10.6.8 and you hav the installation disk, you might be able to reinstall the OS. However, if you updated from the Apple Store and downloaded 10.7 or 10.8, then you would neked to use Recovery. Try to think real hard, OK?

EDIT: You said you had removed the Geneva font. Which folder did you delete it from? Or did you used Font Book or another Font Manager?

Please give us much more info on this, OK?

This is also a common problem when one installs Microsoft products. They duplicate a lot of the Apple fonts and cause all sorts of havoc with capital "A" in boxes.

If that is the problem then you'll need to run Font Book in your Applications Folder. There are commands here to check for corrupted or duplicate fonts.

You may also want to try Restore Standard Fonts (also in Font Book) to see if you can get Geneva back that way.

Throwing it away will not fix the duplicate fonts installed by Microsoft.

I don't understand what you mean when you say you click on file and it is gray.

Are you able to open Font Book at all? Are you opening it and then the File is an empty gray box?

Well, if there are no commands showing up under the items in the menu bar then yes, your OS is probably corrupted. You can try to reboot your computer one more time and then follow my instructions. If you still get the gray boxes then you will have to reinstall the OS.

With 10.7 you need to reboot while holding down option (it may take a while) until you see a picture of some hard drives on the screen. One of them will be Recovery HD. Click on it and reinstall the OS.

Yes, at this point you will lose data. Hopefully you have it backed up somewhere. In any case you cannot use the computer currently so you could not obtain access to your data anyway.

dancer --

Your system is messed up, and I'm pretty sure you tookthe Geneva font out of the SYSTEM folder, instead of one of the Library font folders.

I would go ahead and reinstall your system. That will put the font back.

Keeping fingers crossed for you, dancer. I'm sure they will fix you up just fine. Be sure to ask them to make certain the Geneva font in the SYSTEM folder is there.

Let us know how you do, OK?