ASCII special characters not showing in Live Messenger 2011 chat

I have just bought an Acer laptop running windows 7 home premium 64bit. However, when running the preinstalled Windows Live Messenger 2011 on this system, special characters such as ☺ or ♫ do not show up correctly in the chat window, instead appearing as a blank box. They do however show up in the contact list for contacts that have such characters in their names or messages.

Does anyone have suggestions as to why this might be happening and what can be done in order to display these characters correctly? Thanks!

Hi Martin,

Thanks! Changing the font allows the characters to be displayed in messages, but they still do not show up when used in contacts' names. How can I change the font that the program uses to display the line "XYZ says"?