puttyssh
As you can see below in the image, when I use PuTTY it displays these unreadable characters. I have been Googling forever but not yet found the answer, so I thought maybe someone on SO knows this. All settings are unchanged in this program. I have tried many SSH clients; all do this. Is this something with Windows?
When a connection is ended or fails (notice the "inactive" in the title bar), a new menu option appears in the window menu "Restart Session". This will reconnect the session.
Recent Cygwin updates have changed its X server to not listen for TCP connections by default. Instead, Cygwin's X uses (the Cygwin implementation of) Unix domain sockets, and PuTTY (as a native Windows program) doesn't know how to use these.
The Cygwin X FAQ and Cygwin mailing lists have more details.
My solution was to take the standard Cygwin shortcut that uses startxwin to launch X:
C:\cygwin\bin\run.exe --quote /usr/bin/bash.exe -l -c "cd; /usr/bin/startxwin"
and replace it with a direct invocation of xinit with my desired options (add -listen tcp and remove -auth):
C:\cygwin\bin\run.exe --quote /usr/bin/bash.exe -l -c "cd; /usr/bin/xinit /etc/X11/xinit/startxwinrc -- /usr/bin/XWin :0 -multiwindow -listen tcp"
This is less secure than Cygwin's new defaults; it should only be used on a single-user system, and configuring your firewall to block connections to XWin may be wise.
Best Answer
It looks like one (or perhaps more) of the following:
If the text displays OK when cut and pasted into Notepad, it confirms this. Set PuTTY to use the same font and encoding as Notepad (at least initially).
Since everything works at a different location you probably need to copy settings from there and use a Font that works in Notepad.
To see Putty's Font, Right click the top left icon in Putty Window title-bar
Then select
Change Settings ...If mRemoteNG is getting in the way of seeing Putty settings, stop using mRemoteNG until you have everything working in plain unadorned standalone normal unviolated Putty.