Windows 7 - ControlPanel\Fonts and notepad\fonts hanging

I see other threads regarding the symptom of hanging while going into Control Panel -> Fonts, however they seem unresolved. I noticed this problem after troubleshooting Notepad hanging while going to fonts. I am running Windows Home Premium x64 on a C2D MacBook Pro (via BootCamp). My observations and troubleshooting are below. If anyone has any ideas on how to fix this, they would be greatly appreciated!

I do not get these symptoms under a newly created user account, however; I am not willing to take the solution of just using a newly created account as the only option. I am thinking there might be something in the HKCU key that might be broken.

Observations:
Format -> font... in Notepad is causing the application to hang, resulting in a jump in memory usage (anywhere between 60-150 MB), and pegs the CPU usage to 50% on each core. Prodding around, I notice Word sometimes hangs like Notepad when accessing the fonts drop-down bar. Wordpad doesn't seem to have this problem.

I notice this also happens when checking the Fonts folder via the control panel, but I can cancel the progress bar (which hangs near the end) and regain control of the window. When going to the Fonts folder, explorer pegs the CPU like Notepad, but consumes ALL REMAINING physical RAM (4 GB in total, typically using up the remainder ~2.5 GB).

Troubleshooting:
Attempting to move all 500+ fonts files out of c:\windows\fonts gets all but 275 of them. Trying to get the rest from safe mode does not seem to work. I initially wiped out the Notepad registry key from HKCU, hoping it was a broken configuration. I can get all the fonts to display in explorer sometimes if I stop the loading early and change the view type; I do not know what to make of this. I have tried turning off clear-type, and restoring default font settings. Nothing I have done so far has managed to fix the problem of Notepad locking up when trying to choose a font.

I saw the identical problem with Windows 7 Ultimate x64 using a Mid-2011 Macbook Air, Lion and Boot Camp 4.01.


I escalated several incidents with Apple over this, and also paid for an incident with Microsoft. Microsoft techs spent a very long time trying to resolve this issue but could not.

Did you ever find the cause and/or a solution to this issue???