e-mail contents display only as symbols

Three times this month Opera has started displaying the contents of every email as various symbols. Even the Opera Help and Forums displayed only symbols. The problem appears to be limited to Opera, as I can view emails successfully with Outlook Express or my ISP's Webmail while this is happening.

Each time after I have reinstalled Opera the same emails that displayed only symbols have displayed correctly. The email contents evidently were not corrupted, just failed to display properly. The downside of reinstalling is that bookmarks, contacts, lists, and labels revert to default contents, essentially empty, and I have to manually replace them with backup copies. Settings are lost and I have to manually change them. The whole process is time-consuming.

I immediately suspected some sort of worm or virus. Although I have firewall and anti virus software that I keep up to date, I know that something can slip through. So I have run scans searching for viruses, rootkits, and malware without finding anything.
Has anyone else experienced this or have an idea of what could cause It?

Opera 11.51
Windows XP SP3
POP3
ISP (FairPoint)

Tom

Originally posted by jojfrost:

Has anyone else experienced this or have an idea of what could cause It?

Never had this problem.

Originally posted by jojfrost:

Although I have firewall and anti virus software that I keep up to date

Might be the anti-virus or firewall itself. If the anti-virus has an email scanner and a web scanner, the next time this happens, disable them.

For web pages, a page usually only shows as symbols if it's sent with the wrong mime type or it's doubly-compressed and the server sent the wrong headers or "Menu -> page -> encoding" is not set to "automatic". The wrong mime type issue can cause some emails to be shown like that too. But, it might be one of your security programs that causes it. This can happen with firewalls sometimes too where they forget the program you allowed and uninstalling and reinstalling by cause a redetection of the program.

And, even if OE works fine through this, don't assume anything by that.

Thanks Burnout426. This may be the answer. I've recently installed updates to AVG and Zone Alarm. I'll investigate further and post the result.

Today emails are OK but some URLs not. Here's the first line from Opera Help:
fU n=^+0b"usye6'±n WUZ^6)QoiUoJE gX¥'»D'KMD'kU6(<D-H+npiODce.f§ceu- /?yOb5

Tom

Burnout426: Where do I find "Menu -> page -> encoding" ? I've looked in *opera:config#UserPrefs* without finding it. My settings in Opera are initialized to default. Help and Forums in Opera are scrambled so I am viewing them in Slim Browser.
Tom

Originally posted by jojfrost:

Where do I find "Menu

If the menu bar is tunred on (not the default), click file and uncheck "show menu bar". Then, "Menu" is the big "Opera" button at the top left.

If you have the menu bar turned on, I think it's under the View menu.

Thanks for your help. The symbols problem was apparently due to AVG 2012, specifically the Link Scanner Surf Shield. A fix is supposed to be in the works. Meanwhile, I have disabled that feature.

Tom

Originally posted by jojfrost:

Thanks for your help. The symbols problem was apparently due to AVG 2012, specifically the Link Scanner Surf Shield. A fix is supposed to be in the works. Meanwhile, I have disabled that feature.

Awesome!

Thank you so much!
Had the same problem and I was googling this for ages before i found this thread...
after reading your post it occurred to me that i had just updated my AVG, I changed the setting and bingo!
so relieved to be surfing with my beloved opera again, thanks again