I did a fresh installation of Morrowind after doing a system recovery on my laptop. For some reason my user interface looks like http://i.imgur.com/Tn4wfYp.jpg, displaying "sAttributeStrength" instead of Strength. What is causing this?

That's caused by dirty GMSTs.

A mod you're using has the "evil 72" GMSTs added to it and they need to be cleaned out.