I've just started up visual studio express 2008 for the first time in 6 months, and the when I expand the properties window, all the name/values are rendered as squares. Event the ellipses (...) are squares! The weird thing is, all other text is OK, the code, toolbar, menus etc.
What font/character set does visual studio use for this text? and why is only the propert window affected?
That's fairly odd. I haven't seen a bug like that yet.
If it is a font issue, you can fix it by resetting all of your settings. Go to Tools -> Import / Export Settings. Reset all settings and pick your profile. Rebuild and Restart Visual Studio and see if the problem goes away.
My second guess would be to check the file encoding. Visual Studio should work fine with most file encodings but it's not bad to sanity check. Click on File -> Save As and set the text type to be ASCII. Then restart Visual Studio and see if the problem goes away.