At the top of my admin panel on the "Themes" tab, it says "Current theme for" and then a bunch of garbled characters.

If i copy paste the text, it pastes fine: ie. "Photo Albums (Gallery)"

It looks like this: http://vonalbrecht.com/deleteGarble1.JPG

Is it an encoding issue?

Looks like an encoding issue to me. I don't know much about that though. You should look at the encoding set in the options of the admin back-end and look at your database encoding to make sure that they are fine.

anyone have any ideas?

EDIT: looks like my Courier font was corrupted