Restart machine, text editor pop up window

Can you get a picture of the display contents, and post it?

Very unlikely any viri would be active, let alone affect OS X.

There are adware and other kinds of things one can get by

going to a messed up web site and/or downloading junk.

You may be able to start up in SafeBoot and look around,

perhaps take a look into the Console utility to see if any

other activities have been recorded in the system logs;

and see what kinds of things are active in the Activity

Monitor utility. If you've been using Safari, look and see

if that browser has extensions active, if so, disable them.

😐

That looks a bit like some of the black magic spam content that was loaded into ASC for a few moments, as new members tested the waters. Nothing that could affect anyone visiting, though; and it was removed by Hosts.

Not sure what the deal is with all that fancy use of characters in your text editing software.

Been away for about 12 hours due to some reconfiguration of the Community discussions site, so several who may have visited in that lag time could be able to look into the system about now. Perhaps some near genius volunteer or someone with experience moonlighting as an exterminator may step in with a can of black flag?

I would, but for the distance. Also we're having a light blustery cool weather event with Siberian chill overtaking north Pacific humidity; elsewhere they'd call it a blizzard. Yet no local shoveling has been required in this location. The storm is only 800 miles wide, though.

I don't remember where I'd seen the kind of text gibberish similar to that you've been experiencing, and do not know if a file corruption or other malady could be the cause of it. I remember a logic board issue in one of my antique Macs did some strange things, but that affected the entire machine. I was able to replace the CPU and had found it was re-writing all readable files as gibberish.

An upgrade was a defacto degrade 🙂

PS: ^ Your sample reminds me of web page code, gone awry.

Depending on the cause, a popup (from a browser affected by some redirect or other adware, malware, etc) could give you an odd page full of junk characters; a mal-formed web page, perhaps. A symptom of something else.

If you are using Safari, look into the Extensions to see if there is anything there you didn't allow, and delete it. Could be some other items were installed if you visited a questionable site of free software downloads, where conduit, genieo, and other bad deals can reside until you accidentially invite them in.

http://www.thesafemac.com/tech-guides/

Not sure if it'll help, but should hurt... 😐

Probably some local startup or launchd plist that's gone wrong.

That display looks like a non-text file, such as something that was edited with a GUI editor (and should not have been) and then saved, or a command that's displaying a data or an executable file, or a file that got copied to the "wrong" filename.

If the beginning of that wad of data is treated as file magic, then the code implies that the file involved is associated with an Adaptic Multi-Rate CODEC somehow.

Does the TextEdit window tell you what file is involved, if you poke around in the TextEdit menus? That might help narrow the list of what's triggering this.

Corp --

That looks like a font screw-up. Did you recently add a whole bunch of fonts to your Mac? Have you just added Office or an Adobe app?

Have you checked for duplicate or corrupt fonts in Font Book lately? I would do that first.

If not cleared up yet, you might have to clear your font caches.

You can safely clear one of the most basic font caches by starting up in SAFE mode.

It will not hurt anything, and just might fix it.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1564?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

After being in SAFE mode, simply restart as usual. See if that clears up the font problem.

Have you checked System Preferences - Accounts (Users & Groups) - Login Items ?.

corp_crayon wrote:

All I had to do was disable a couple programs from autoloading and that solved it.

Can you share with us what those were? You might have something new or you might need to remove some additional files that are running processes that aren't so obvious.