Major font mayhem

gridsystems · 06 Dec 2010

[problem solved see third post in thread for details]

Hi,
My fonts folder has gone corrupt. It all started with me trying out a 3rd party font manager that made operation on the font folder and then when I uninstalled that font manager it could not correctly reinstall the system fonts. Or rather, it reinstalled them, but they stayed on other locations on the harddrive instead of being in the fonts folder.

So the perfectionist in me tried to restore things back to how it was before, and after trying many things I figured I'd go drastic and since I had backups of all the font files from before, I booted into Linux and simply deleted the contents of the c:\windows\fonts folder and replaced with the contents of my backup.

I thought that would work but it didn't. The whole OS became unbootable, so I had to insert the Windows 7 DVD and run system repair twice before it would let me boot.

When I now booted, fonts were ugly, and I went into the fonts folder and manually installed all the *.fon files (of which there were plenty of duplicates).

After reboot all looks fine and all software have access to the fonts they need, so I guess I could be content, but I am not. The fonts folder is only displaying 13 odd files while a different 3rd party font manager shows all font files present in the fonts folder as being installed and they are so as well since I can use them in applications. The windows fonts folder appear corrupt, it is just like any other folder now.

The perfectionist in me would like to restore fonts folder functionality but I do not know how.

Does anyone have any ideas what I could do?

Jacee · 06 Dec 2010

Have you tried this? http://social.answers.microsoft.com/...c-18fcdca4fe26

gridsystems · 07 Dec 2010

Hi,
Yes I had tried that restoring default font settings button, but it did not do any good.

However, in the meanwhile I googled a few more hours and found out what the problem was:

It appears the Windows font folder functionality depends on first the content of the desktop.ini inside that folder. If this files gets deleted the folder reverts to normal folder behaviour. And when desktop.ini gets automatically generated it it has been deleted it is a regular desktop.ini and not the special font folder version of it. I grabbed a copy of it off of my dual booting 32-bit OS and upon restart of explorer the font folder was once again a font folder.

Now there was only the other problem with only 13 fonts showing up there. To cut a long story short, the font that do show up in the Windows 7 font folder;
-are neither the fonts that are actually present in that location,
-nor the fonts that are currently istalled on your system,
-but the fonts that have their file extensions associated with the Windows font viewer.

And my OTF and TTF were associated with the 3rd party font manager. I restored the file associations with the reg file at this location (Default File Type Associations - Restore) and ater reboot all it back to how it should be.

It is amazing that this simple thing has not been documented more wildly yet on the internet because I see tons and tons of people complaining about broken font folders in Windows 7 and none seems to know what to do when the font folder goes berserk.

Well at least those lucky few who read through this thread will now now, and can stop tearing their hair from their heads...

Over and out.