I just updated to 10.8.4 and my mail program is showing a series of boxes with AAAAs inside them instead of the email addresses. Also when on Safari web pages are displaying the same AAAAAs instead of type. Firefox displays fine. Can someone help me?

Restart your Mac and immediately hold down the Shift key when you hear the startup chime to boot into Safe Mode. Keep holding the Shift key until you see a progress bar towards the bottom of the screen. You can let go of the Shift key at that point.

OS X asks you to log in (you will get this screen on a Safe Mode boot even if your Mac is set to automatically log in). Let the Mac finish booting to the desktop and then restart normally. This will clear Font Book's database and the cache files of the user account you logged into in Safe Mode.

Next, close all running applications. From an administrator account, open the Terminal app and enter the following command. You can also copy/paste it from here into the Terminal window:

sudo atsutil databases -remove

Terminal will then ask for your admin password. As you type, it will not show anything, so be sure to enter it correctly.

This removes all font cache files. Both for the system and the current user font cache files. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.

You're welcome. Easy fixes are always good. 🙂