Characters not displaying

[Dietrich]

Recently (sometime in the past week; I'm not sure what day this happened) Asian characters stopped displaying on my computer (PC, Win7, SP1). For example, instead of the kanji for Ai Shinozaki's name, it just reads "篠崎愛"—

Wait, what?(!)

I select what is displayed as a little row of tall, narrow rectangles in the parentheses of my Ai Shinozaki folder's name, but when I paste them into the post-writing window (while using Chrome), the characters display correctly. Is it (just) Windows Explorer that is for some reason no longer displaying Japanese (and, for all I know, all non-Western) characters correctly? When I mouse over the Japanese Word-of-the-Day skin in my Rainmeter setup, the tooltip also shows tall, narrow rectangles. Any of you vastly-more-computer-savvy-than-I folks perhaps have some idea about what's the deal?

[AYHJA]

Check your Windows Update History and see if you can pinpoint the change, if so, just uninstall it and or let me see what it says, there may be a hotfix..!

[Dietrich]

Thanks much for the tip, Über-san! =)

Strangely, no sooner had I checked Windows Update History (which revealed no updates in the past month that, AFAIK, would've affected display of foreign characters) than I moused over the aforementioned Japanese WotD thingy in my Rainmeter "skin" and saw that the tooltip is displaying the Japanese characters correctly; and then I checked my Japanese pics folder and saw that the name kanji are displaying correctly. The only clear difference between when I made my initial post and now is that last night I installed the latest QuickTime (so as to listen to audio files at Wikipedia) and restarted my computer. But as with the stuff listed in Windows Update from the past month, I can't see why that would affect display of characters. Mayhap twas just a temporary glitch.