Corrupted font caches. Almost always, they only corrupt when you're using Office or Quark Xpress a lot. They screw with many things besides the applications that broke them. This is part of what makes the Mac unique.
Read this for diagnosis, description, and solution: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313535
Alternately, you can pay $50 for shareware to type 'rm -r ~/foo/fontcache' when you tell it to: http://www.insidersoftware.com/SM_fix.php
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Read this for diagnosis, description, and solution:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313535
Alternately, you can pay $50 for shareware to type 'rm -r ~/foo/fontcache' when you tell it to:
http://www.insidersoftware.com/SM_fix.php