Fonts appearing abnormally large in IE7

Question

I have the following specified on body: body { font: 63.5% Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

In Virtual Machines, I am unable to setup an IE7 installation to reproduce this problem, but on others' machines, some with IE7 render the font on the page abnormally large. The actual CSS and html are hundreds of lines long across multiple files, but I'm at a loss as to why only CERTAIN IE7 environments would produce this behavior.

Any thoughts on where I should be looking?

Zoom is 100% and text-size is medium. Although text-size IS medium, setting the text-size to anything larger than medium on my machines and VMs produces the same exact problem: overlapping text and images. Hmmm....

Display size in windows is set to normal (96dpi)

Answer 1

This is a bit of shot in the dark, but you could check what the Text Size is set to in IE. If you go View Menu > Text Size and reset it to Medium.

Answer 2

Wild guess, but it might have something to do with the DPI setting. I'm pretty sure IE7 is using that setting, and if that setting is not the same on all your environments that might explain your problem.

On Windows XP you change it by going to Desktop -> Properties -> Settings -> Advanced Here you can chose between normal size (96 dpi) and large size (120 dpi).

Answer 3

Dell screws with font installations, for some reason, and will fuss up a number of fonts if any "Dell software" is installed.