A friend of mine's Windows would work ok, but if she opened up her media player, the text in all programs would get screwy, letters would have huge gaps between

A friend of mine's Windows would work ok, but if she opened up her media player, the text in all programs would get screwy, letters would have huge gaps between them. After looking around a lot, I thought about scandisk (or was it chkdsk?). It identified some bad sectors where a font file was residing on disk. Why did it only go screwy when she opened her media player? She had songs with Mandarin Chinese titles. Only when Windows tried to load the non-Latin characters from the font did it hit the bad sector(s).