Binary package hint: wine
There is important regression in Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) wine packages - lots of non ISO-8859-1 glyphs (Cyrillic, Lithuanian, etc. letters) are missing in built-in Tahoma font.
This causes displaying "::::::" instead of these letters in lots of applications, which uses Tahoma font (almost all installers uses this font).
This bug is known by upstream - look at http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10025 , but it seems they don't have resources to fix this bug quickly.
I'm reporting this bug in Ubuntu, because Ubuntu is used by lots of people in various languages and this bug should be fixed before Ubuntu 8.04 LTS will be released.
There is a quick fix (workaround) for this bug - we should remove built-in tahoma font (it was included since wine 0.9.47) from wine package, then wine will use system fonts as replacement and these fonts has needed characters in most cases (because admin usually installs fonts, needed for users).
Another solution would be to use fonts from DejaVu project (http://dejavu.sf.net , most of them are already included in Ubuntu) - DejaVu fonts already has all symbols for most popular languages.
Without a built in Tahoma font Wine will actually use no font at all - that's why steam was generating blank characters until people installed a (copied from Windows) Tahoma by hand. All removing Tahoma would do is break things for people who use Fonts that the built-in Tahoma has glyphs for.
On that note, Wine's Tahoma now has cyrillic glyphs, but it still needs Lithuanian, Greek, and probably a few others. See the upstream bug.
I'll probably post an email to ubuntu-