Ah, my old nemesis. Again we do battle.
Someone advised me to do a clean install, or whatever they call it now, so I did. I had never used Migration Assistant before. It is quite a clever, helpful tool. Otherwise, I would have spent hours re-installing.
I was curious about what got moved. I know the obvious files, my programs and their preferences, my itunes library, but since the problem of the jaggy text remains, I wonder whether something was migrated from my backup that caused the problem.
Here's how I did it. I booted from the CD retail verion of 10.6.3, ran Disk Utility on my iMac, zeroed the data, erased the disk, used migration assistant to transfer files from my backup drive to my iMac.
Then I installed the Combo Update 10.6.8. And that's when I got the old problem. System fonts render incorrectly: jagged, fuzzy, thinner. Yet the text inside programs is, I think, normal or closer to normal. In Firefox, the text actually looks better or at least different. It's certainly different. Web pager text looks anti-aliased and it didn't before, though I doubt this how it is supposed to be. Something changed without my changing it.
Navigation text, the program's text rather than web page's, has the same problem as the system fonts. The tool bar text, bookmark text, and menu bar at the top ("FireFox" "File" Edit" "View") all have the same jaggy problem and looked bad compared to web page text.
I would like to have a list of files that were migrated and a list of files that were changed or installed. System info gives me some of them, tells me what has been modified. I have the program Beyond Compare, which might be able to do that if I can figure out how.
Something changes from 10.6.3 to 10.6.8., and really it's more likely 10.6.8 is the culprit because I was running 10.6.7 before I tried this latest experiment. Fonts look normal on 10.6.7. So it's something in the 10.6.8 update that's causing the problem. Maybe I can find a list of files that get changed or created from 10.6.7 to 10.6.8.
I downloaded Font Doctor, and it found no corrupt fonts. I tried that a long time ago with Font Explorer, and got the same result.
