font problem? character set? window manager? cryptic symbols on my system

[dcarrco]

hey folks.  loving this sparkylinux, especially since Crunchbang is gone and this is bleeding edge stuff.  anyway, after an update a while back i noticed that my system was having a hard time finding the appropriate characters.  it happens a LOT in firefox, but also in Gimp and across the system more or less.  im not sure if im not ISO-9660 or whatever that means but i dont know how to find the problem.  because i am dumb, i guess.  heres a screenshot of Microsoft Outlook.  most of the time i can figure out what it means, but still seems like it might be an easy fix for someone.. smarter.  any ideas?