It sounds like a font problem. if you can change your apperance to use a different font that might help it.

does the text look something like this:  ?

this means either a font is missing or corrupted or has been switched to a font that does not have the regular character set. one way to fix this is to change the font face, another is to reinstall the font your using now.

That is exactly what it looks like. Will a windows update fix this? I have never heard of reinstalling fonts before.

Like Mastadex asked, did you recently change your fonts/appearance in your desktop settings?

This happened to my wife's system once when she was tweaking her settings. Certain font sets don't have apostrophes ('), so instead of displaying an apostrophe, you'd come up with a  .

Try changing things back to windows defaults.