Weird language on Win XP control panel

[preacherman481]

Ok,
It seems to be Arabic. I know very little about Arabic, but I ran the words through an on line dictionary.

جدار حماية Windows
(This reads literally Windows Protection Wall, Defense Wall, or something of the sort.)

I didn't bother looking up the other words. I assume they are just translations of the icon's captions from English.

I assume Arabic is like Hebrew having the vowels underneath, but that's my assumption.

[nihil]

Not sure there preacherman, I thought that traditional (Koranic) Arabic had vowels above and below.

Arabic is the same as Hebrew in that it is a right to left language. After all they are both Semitic languages are they not?

This one attracted me because it is different from the run of the mill garbage I normally get to clean out.

Undies~ makes an interesting point:

Had another AntiVirusXP job today.. Guess which three Icons had a change of Font (looked Chinese??)???
Must be the region that the bug is being picked up.. my thought is the AVXP Server must be having issues with regions.. or it could just be the server's region..

It certainly looks like this AntiVirusXP or 2008 scareware, which got me thinking that it might even be deliberate?

The general idea of scareware is to frighten the victim into buying useless software. Perhaps changing a few icons is intended to scare people some more as they can actually see the apparent infection.

Preacherman,

The first icon is the Windows firewall, so the literal translation seems reasonable?

[preacherman481]

Arabic is the same as Hebrew in that it is a right to left language. After all they are both Semitic languages are they not?

Yes, I'm confident enough to say both are right to left, and they are members of the same language family. Also, in normal use, the vowels are not written at all.

The first icon is the Windows firewall, so the literal translation seems reasonable?

Yes, I think so.

The OP seems to have company with this problem. This post in another forum seems to describe the same type (if not identical) problem. It dates back to December 2006.

http://www.anetforums.com/posts.aspx?ThreadIndex=62643

[cardd22]

Thanks for all the suggestions and posts fellas. Will try them on the weekend see if it makes any difference. Worse comes to worse I've backed up all my important files, I'll just re-format and re-install.