Somehow I manged to mess up my firefox menu fonts.

I'm running ubuntu 10.04, updated as of this posting's date.

Please see the attached picture of FF (ugly, thin, menu font) alongside OpenOffice (normal menu font) on the same gnome desktop. Interestingly, FF looks little better on the screenshot than it does on my monitor. Something is seriously wrong.

Symptoms:

• It is only the FF menus that are affected, not the content of the pages that load, or the menu I get when I click on the window title bar (Maximise, Minimise .... Close)
• No other applications are affected - all their menus are normal.
• No other users are affected - their FF has normal menu fonts. So I am thinking it has to be some file in ~ that is messing this up. But I can't find it.

Solutions attempted:

• I closed FF, renamed /home/tred/.mozilla and restarted FF - No improvement
• I logged out, logged in as root, and renamed /home/tred/.gnome -No improvement when I logged in as myself.
• I logged out, logged in as root, and renamed /home/tred/.gnome2 - No improvement when I logged in as myself.
• I looked at everything available in gconf-editor and found nothing relevant.
• I have been to System - Preferences - Appearance, and nothing seems to make any difference.

I wish I had had the sense to make a backup before I tried KDE4

Background:

I liked KDE3, but it seems that is history now, and KDE4 is not for me, so I moved to gnome. I am still getting used to it, but it's functional

All was well until I installed the KDE4 desktop, because I thought I'd "give it another try".

I logged into KDE4 and ran it under my own username. I managed to open firefox, but that was about it. I logged out because although KDE4 is pretty, it's still useless for my needs.

So I went back to gnome, and that's when the problem with FF first appeared.

My mouse-pointer cursor has also changed. Instead of a "clockface" spinning when something is waiting, I now have two small circles orbiting an invisible point. No big deal, though it might be relevant.

Any suggestions as to where to look ? I'm a "newbie" when it comes to gnome.

Attached Thumbnails

 

Have you uninstalled KDE ? Can you diff the .mozilla files against those of other users ?
I would guess that KDE altered a font preference or path and it has not been reset.
Maybe reinstall firefox (after removing KDE) ?

Also you could try this :

type about:config in the address bar [enter]
find layout.css.dpi (type dpi in the filter)
change the value to '0' -- this forces firefox to use system font settings
restart firefox

I don't seem to be able to. I installed it by installing kubuntu-desktop which led to a load of other stuff being installed.
Now, selecting "Complete removal" of kubuntu-desktop, just offers to remove that package, and frees up only 53kB
Waay too much output, and in any case, deleting ~/.mozilla hasn't helped.

Fixing layout.css.dpi in about:config hasn't helped, and a reinstall of FF hasn't helped either.

I think I'll just re-create my user, and never use KDE4 again!
Thanks for your suggestions though.

The only other thing I can think of would be the users personal kde settings may still be causing trouble. Like the .gnome files but kde related. I don't use kde so I don't know what they're called. But deleting them can't hurt.

Thanks again for the suggestion. KDE keeps stuff under ~/.kde
Renaming that and logging in again .... didn't fix firefox.
Sigh.

I am about to make a backup of my personal files, then I'll re-create my user.

I just created a new user, and their FF is working properly, so this should make the problem go away. I am just annoyed that I can't find the config file that is at fault.

Fortunately I don't have much customisation to do.