Crystal Reports - Inserting Random Characters into Report Output

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Crystal Reports is seemingly randomly adding characters into report output. This is so strange, I almost think we have a virus.

We have been running these same reports with the same version of Crystal reports for a good while now. No one has made changes to the reports and the database data is correct, but the output on the reports now have random characters (usually t's and i's) seemingly inserted at random in between and on top of the text. Even such simple fields as usernames are affected.

It is only doing this with PDF output. Also happens on development machine. Not only limited to server. It is not happening in the integrated Crystal Reports development environment within VS2010. If you preview the report there, it works fine.

Is anyone aware of any Crystal Reports issues that could cause this behavior?

Additional Information:
- Crystal reports v 10.5.37
- Running on Windows Server 2008, IIS 7, Also local Win7 dev machines
- All machines are x64
- Requested through ASP.Net 4 intranet site
- Database server is SQL Server 2008 R2

[UPDATE]
We have resolved the issue, though we do not know the actual cause.

In the answer I posted below, it mentioned Calibri causing problems with the PDF output. None of our reports were set to output in Calibri, but they were. We went through all of our reports and re-set the fonts to Arial and now the random letters are gone.

What still bothers me is that these reports were working fine for the past year up until yesterday. Why did it suddenly decide to happen now?

If I find any more information, I will update this question. We greatly appreciate those who took the time to help diagnose the issue.

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asp.netpdfcrystal-reports
Are they normal Ts and Is, or do they appear accented or otherwise non-English? – Paul Abbott
They are normal lower case t's and i's. Some are inserted after existing t's but may be coincidental. Words like customer are output as Cusitiomer and such. It is not every word or every line but frequently enough that you quickly notice. – Kevin Shanahan
Maybe some language settings? Encoding? – Robert Niestroj
I don't think it is a language setting or encoding, some of the letters are placed behind and on top of paragraphs such that the text becomes completely unreadable. Other places it is fit between characters like it was meant to be. – Kevin Shanahan
And when you export it directly in Crystal Reports then it gets corrupted too? – Robert Niestroj

1 Answers

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We may have found a possible answer to the problem. It turns out Crystal Reports doesn't play well with other USP10.dll's on the system. If it grabs the wrong one, it is known to produce bad text output, especially when using calibri font.

Link to relative post on SAP Community Site

David Hilton's reply near the bottom of the page:

There were a few mentions of conflicts with usp10.dll. We need a very specific version of usp10.dll for our text rendering to work correctly. Often Microsoft Office ships with a different usp10.dll and can cause problems with our product.


I am posting this as an answer because it may help some people. If it turns out to be what resolves our problem I will mark it as the answer.