I had to unistall and reinstall the mscorefonts to get it to work. like this

sudo apt-get remove ttf-mscorefonts-installer

then

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

after I rebooted and all was good. Nothing worked before this. It must have been that I already had the mscorefonts before adding google earth. The only way to get them to reconfigure was to un-install then reinstall.