Why do i sometimes get garbled chinese characters replacing accented letters on my computer?

well im not completely sure but check in your lower right hand corner. Of course there is a clock and the tray bar thingy, well on the left from the tray you may have this little box with 2 or 3 letters in it. Thats a language bar and using it you can set different languages so later when its picked you can make signs and letters from that languages. Well if its not EN(English) than click on the box and there should be an option to pick English. Hope this helps im not really sure this is what you meant but i hope it is. And the pretty weird thing about it, it can change for no reason, i almost always have mine set to EN and sometimes all the sudden i see my web is messed up and i realize that the language bar for some reason changed the language. :)