When I boot up Ubuntu 14.04 x64 the font at the top panel, the unity dash, the icon texts, and nautilus is really wierd. It looks thin and blurry, unlike the usual Ubuntu text font. It looks alot like the default Gnome or Mate text if you know what I mean.

When I restart Unity and Nautilus once everything has loaded, the text problems go away. Same when I log back in and log back out. This only happens when I cold boot or reboot my computer. It's like the text is loading correctly.

What could be going on? Any suggestions?

What's the difference between a hot boot and a cold boot?
The bios is read on the cold boot.
I'd start there.
It's a fair bet no font designer ever got an email from his boss that said "To fat and clear!, make it thin and blurry!"
While I was in the bios, I might look at my video display settings. Look for something that might effect fine grain rendering, things like fonts.
An interesting test would be to cold boot it, start X, make sure the defective rendering is occurring, halt X and then restart the X server and check to see if it's still going on. If it isn't, I'd take a closer look at the Xserver or make sure Gnomes fonts are in your default path.
Post back if you find something interesting or you think I can help.

no i don't.
i do believe you have a real problem here, but so far all you're saying is "i don't like the way it looks".

can you define the problem in objective terms?
which fonts?
maybe post screenshots?
when did the problem start? after an upgrade? or some software install?
have you tried troubleshooting? different fonts? unity's settings for anti-aliasing, hinting, dpi?

fwiw, i really don't think that bios or graphic card or driver are involved.

you can always take a look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log if something looks relevant?

Its kinda hard to describe, but the fonts look thin and blurry, pixelated, on boot up. When I restart unity by going into the terminal and typing "unity", the problems go away and the text at the panel and dash goes back to normal.

I checked which fonts I am using and they are Ubuntu and Sans, but when I boot up, the panel and dash texts are not those fonts, but rather the default Mate fonts.

Is this clear enough?

The problem has always been here. Another wierd thing that happens is when I use dual monitors, on boot up, the screen is mirrored and takes about 10 seconds for it to revert back to the resolution I selected at first. Installing up to date AMD graphics drivers do nothing to help.

Hi, I'm new to the forum, and signed up to respond to your question, as I'm having a similar problem. Strangely, it's not been solved in the Ubuntu 14.04.1 point release.

The problem (i believe) is to do with a software patch that is not loading correctly on login. Canonical wrote this patch so that the Unity environment would use the special 'Ubuntu font' and 'Ambiance' or 'Radiance' themes, rather than the standard GNOME 3 font (which is the thin fuzzy one you're seeing).

The patch also restores drop down menus to nautilus. As such, you've probably noticed that the menus sometimes disappear from the top unity menu bar, and two buttons appear in the right hand side of the toolbar in an open nautilus window.

It doesn't seem to be a common problem, and google searches dont bring up much about it. It's a software (rather than hardware problem), but I don't know of any solutions to it. I just thought I'd give this thread a heads up incase anyone knows of a solution.

Thanks