I know this is an old topic, but after a day of messing about I've found the cause, and the solution. Hopefully it'll help others with the same problem. The "boxes" are caused by one-or-more missing fonts (I've narrowed it down to 5 of them). These are removed when you select the "Traditional Chinese" language support for removal. To fix it, choose to protect the following 5 files, it'll add ~90MB to the install, but that's better than the ~400MB needed to keep the entire "Traditional Chinese" language support. windows\fonts\kaiu.ttf windows\fonts\mingliu.ttc windows\fonts\mingliub.ttc windows\fonts\msjh.ttf windows\fonts\msjhbd.ttf Tested on Vista x64 SP2.