Concerns about disturbing symbolic messages in a graphical font, which Microsoft believed it had assuaged nearly a decade ago, are resurfacing in the wake of terrorist attacks on New York.

Now the company is once again assuring users that it did not intentionally embed hidden messages into MS Word.

In the last 12 days, conspiracy-related websites and mailing lists have centered considerable attention on an eerie string of graphics that come up when users type the capital letters NYC into a font on Word called Wingdings.

The resultant collection of images – which includes symbols for a skull and crossbones, a Star of David and a thumbs-up sign – has led some to conjecture that the program contains a deliberate anti-Semitic message.

But Microsoft – which investigated the same complaints about the font shortly after it was introduced in 1992 – is once again maintaining that a correlation between the letters and images is merely coincidental.

"To Microsoft's mind, it's very unfortunate that people are bringing this up again in light of the tragedy," said Kimberly Kuresman, a Microsoft spokeswoman.

Kuresman said the company investigated the complaints in conjunction with the Anti-Defamation League nine years ago, but found "no evidence of malicious intent."

Recently, however, many conspiracy theorists have been considering other interpretations.

In the two days following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, David Mikkelson, who runs the Urban Legends Reference Pages, said he received about three dozen e-mails from readers pointing out the eerie string of graphics.

On his site, Mikkelson concludes that rumors about eerie images corresponding to the letters NYC are in fact true. (As opposed to other rumors, like the one about blue envelopes containing sponges saturated with a deadly virus that are being anonymously mailed to random Americans.)

However, Mikkelson was unwilling to charge Microsoft with deliberately engineering the troubling strand of images.

"If Microsoft had thought there was anything to it, they've had ten years to change the keyboard mapping, but haven't," he wrote in an e-mail. "I'm sure they (appropriately) consider it too silly to bother with."

Kuresman said Microsoft did consider altering the Wingdings font in the early 1990s, after concerns over the perceived anti-Semitic message first surfaced.

However, the company decided that changing the relationship between letters and images in the font would create too many technical difficulties, including the possibility that users of the original Wingdings would be unable to transfer their work into the newer version, she said.

When Microsoft developed a new graphical font, Webdings, in 1997, Kuresman said typographers took pains to ensure that the image corresponding with the capital letters NYC was a pleasant one. Users who type in that string of letters in Webdings are greeted with graphics for an eye, a heart and a city skyline, symbols for the message "I Love New York."

Don Hosek, a typographer and editor of the typeface magazine Serif, said that graphic font designers don't usually pay much attention to the way particular images correspond to letters on the keyboard.

"We have enough symbols and combinations that it's almost inevitable that you'll find something that's a little sinister," he said. Although it's common for designers to include one or two deliberate messages – usually something innocent like a logo – it's safe to assume that the image strings on Wingdings were randomly generated.

Hosek said he has known the creators of Wingdings – Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes of the font design firm Bigelow & Holmes – for more than a decade and is convinced that they had not intended to offend anyone.

"These are two of the most peace-loving people on the face of the Earth," he said. "There's no way it was anything other than an unfortunate coincidence."

Bigelow and Holmes declined to comment on how the letters NYC came to be associated with the disturbing set of graphics, deferring questions to Microsoft, which purchased the Wingdings font from them prior to the launch of Windows 3.1. Microsoft said it did not believe the font creators had knowingly embedded a malicious message.

The Wingdings font contains 220 pictures that correspond to upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols on the keyboard. The set of graphics was intended to provide common symbols. Along with pictures of things like happy faces, flags and mailboxes, it also contains a set of religious symbols that includes a cross, a star of David and the crescent and star symbol of Islam.

Kuresman speculated that it was certainly possible for someone with a lot of time on their hands to continue entering letters and symbols into the font until they found something that could be interpreted as a message of hate.

One such example she cited was a message that had been floating around on several rumor sites, which claim that typing "Q33NY," a flight number correlated with the attacks, produces a troubling image. When entered into the Wingdings font, some people say the resultant image shows a plane hitting the World Trade Center towers, followed by a skull and crossbones and a Star of David.

The only trouble with this interpretation of the matter, Mikkelson said, is that the two flights that crashed into the towers were American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175.

Microsoft said that the two "tower" images are intended to represent pieces of paper with writing on them.