Outlined text in Weather and Calendar widgets (Tiger)

You have a different Helvetica active than the Helvetica.dfont these widgets are expecting.

This used to happen to me all the time (with the text being on a much higher baseline, as in your temperature reading. Do you maybe have a Helvetica Outline font, or some other version of Helvetica, in your ~/Library/Fonts folder? Move it out of there if so, and if you're in print/design use Suitcase or FontBook to activate your production fonts only as needed.

It's been my experience that if Helvetica.dfont is the first/only Helvetica the system has active at the time Dashboard is first launched, or when you log in, you can safely activate other Helveticas for work without having the widgets screw up again.

Outlined Text

Thank you so much. Finding this post has scratched an itch that's been bugging me for far too long!
Sweet relief

thanks--was a problem in osx 10.8.5 too

This was a problem in my old 10.4 imac and became a problem again in 10.8. I never figured out the problem and thought i was going crazy when it happened again! Thanks so much!