I've just ran a clean installation of vista using vLite and only removing drivers, languages and programs like mediacenter etc... Can anybody tell me why my volume mixer has those little squares in the corner? Was it something I did wrong?

http://i34.tinypic.com/2ywtmoi.jpg

Regards!

looks like you removed something to do with characters. kinda like looking at chineese text if you dont have the language pack installed for it. it shows boxes n such cause it doesnt know how to render the chineese text. so here is likely some special character and vista cant show it to you so it shows that instead.

so i'm just guessing that windows doesnt know how to render or decrypt special signs, designs..etc. mine does same thing btw. i think its cause of removing Charmap. but again i'm just guessing

These characters include some regular used symbols and signs such as © (copyright), ® (registered), ± (plus-minus), ™ (trademark), Ω (ohm), √ (square root), ∞ (infinity), ‼ (double exclamation mark), → (various arrows), ¿ (inverted question mark), ° (degree), µ (micro), ≈ (almost equal to), ≠ (not equal to), ☺ (smilies face), ₠ (Euro currency), € (Euro), £ (English Pound), ¥ (Japanese Yen), ¢ (cent), ² (superscript), ½ (fraction), ≤≥ (greater or small than or equal to), ℅ (care of), «» (double angle quotation mark), œ (Latin capital and small letter), β (Greek capital and small letter), Ѿ (Cyrillic capital and small letter), ك (Arabic letters), א (Hebrew letters) and etc.

No, the problem isn't anything to do with Character Map as I never removed it. So I'm guessing it must be your first suggestion of me removing my language packs. Do you know which actual language pack is needed so I can see the special characters?

Thanks

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.