Internet Explorer 7 shows a password mask character that is too large for a password entry box on a Japanese Web site

To mask the password character, Windows Internet Explorer 7 uses a black circle character. On a Japanese Web site, this character appears as a large circle. Therefore, the password mask character seems not to fit in a password entry box.

To display the dot character (UNICODE 0x25cf) as the password mask character, Internet Explorer 7 selects a font that matches the code page (charset) of the Web page. This hotfix restores previous Internet Explorer 6 behavior in which Internet Explorer uses the Tahoma font for this dot character on all systems and for all Web pages.

Security update information

To resolve this problem, install the most current cumulative security update for Internet Explorer. To install the most current updates, visit the following Microsoft Web site: For more technical information about the most current cumulative security update for Internet Explorer, visit the following Microsoft Web site: Note This update was first included in security update 956390 (MS08-058). For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.