Hi John,

I guess this is a problem with the fonts installed on your system.
Sparky asks for Lucida and Courier fonts. Maybe your system doesnt
have a Lucida font and Sparky is getting some horrible next-best-font.
The right solution is to put the needed fonts on your system. I never
heard of this problem before, so I suspect you have some unusual font
setup. If you prefer you can instead change Sparkys resource file

sparky/lib/Sparky

with a text editor changing the lines that say courier or lucida to
some other font like helvetica or times then restart Sparky and see
if that helps.

Tom