This one has been coming back at me for some time. I've installed one of those Vista Skins for XP over 6 months ago - yes, I can blame Stuart for that :) and then replaced Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 with the RTM version when it was released early in November of last year. Since then I've been having to live with the funky looking dialog windows (some of them) in Visual Studio

It looks like VS is confusing the system font and uses that ugly Fixedsys instead :(  Ughh!

But it appears the custom XP skin it what causes the trouble, so to “fix“ the font

Either

• uninstall your custom skin and reboot
• or just switch to a standard windows theme

This does the trick and my VS Options dialog is back to its normal look

And I got tired of the custom Vista skin anyway ;-)

This fixes the system font issue on your Windows, not just for the Visual Studio - I've seen Opera, some setup kits, and quite a bit of other software getting confused and use the wrong system font.