Overinstalled Fonts... By about 18,000... give or take

[Boosted7]

I've searched...

So my all too thoughtful girlfriend decided that my way of using a font viewer to preview then install was just too much extra work, getting in the way of her valuable learning (read: random clicking without actually paying attention making the same mistakes stumbling onto the same tools only to forget to save, and all...). A quick search for "*.ttf" files, hit Ctrl-A, then did a right click > Install and... the joy of 18,000 fonts. And I thought she wasn't paying attention. She then noticed a very notable decrease in performance, most notably Photoshop (Oh the irony! ), and proceeded to delete as many of them as possible (Ctrl-A, delete, yes-to-all... yes-to-all, and all). This compounded the problem because she managed to delete almost all of the fonts and now there's widespread fallout...

It's as far reaching as the Autoplay pop-up and the WAN Status popup (see pic) appearing with substitute fonts as well as changed point sizes, and various other small noticed changes. Photoshop went from not even loading to crashing almost instantly. I'm not sure what caused more damage, the install or hasty deletion.

It all seems cosmetic at this point, start-up and Photoshop CS4(re-install, but the initial blue page is in some random-micro-font and the menus are still different fonts) are fine again, so I'm looking for a cheat so I don't have to go Reg sniping.

So now I'm here (great site BTW!) hoping there's something new I can learn (OEM Font Pack, Restore OEM Font Utility, Specific Registry changes??) other than just doing a fresh install, which I'm not object to...

I'm certainly not a Pro, but a fairly experienced user dating back to 286/MS-DOS (Got 1.44 BootDisk?)

7600 Ultimate x86, Single User Account

Dell Inspiron e1705 Laptop

T2250 Core Duo 1.73GHz, 533MHz FSB, 2Mb L2 (T7300 on the way...)

2Gb RAM

320Gb Fujitsu 5400rpm

 

[rsvr85]

Hi Boosted7 & welcome to Seven Forums

You may consider a repair install to rectify this problem.

 

[Newt]

I would try a sfc /scannow in the elevated command line and see if that didn't fix the problem.

 

[Boosted7]

SOLVED

I tried both methods mentioned, thank you for the replies!

Repair was easily executed (I've got 7600 on a USB ) but that only works for failed start up issues, memtest and the likes. 7 boots just dandy. (OT FYI - You can go through repair to a command prompt, run notepad, select open *.* files, right click almost any *.exe and run programs, or just use it as a mini-GUI file finder)

sfc /scannow did a few things, namely changing some services stuff, but no dice on the font stuffs.

After getting lost in the MS:shock:Technet for a while to no avail I came up with an idea.

start > regedit (run as admin) > edit > find (Ctrl-f) > *type* font > *click* Find Next > *press* F3 (Find Next)

Keep pressing F3 (lots of times) until you start seeing text entry font names, then when you start coming across them cross-reference them with the Control Panel > Fonts (I had it open and keyed into the search). I came to the MIME reg entries and discovered I was missing Courier New and Arial, both I happened to have in my personal font library.

I re-installed them and both, checked my WiFi Status and my peril wasn't too perilous of a peril!

Once embarked on this particular idea the time to fix was under 5 min.

But there should seriously be some kind of warning or install limit about degraded performance when you hit a certain number of installed fonts in the folder. Coding that vs some kind of "Restore Default Installed Fonts" or the likes.

if file count > 1000
then print "HELP I'M CHOKING!!!"

GOT BASIC?

Thanks to all that looked and didn't reply, but put some time into it nonetheless. It's not a shiny jewel, that's what google is for...

And how do you change something already posted to prefix "Solved"? That option is only available when you first post from what I can see...

 

[Newt]

I know in my old XP I had created a font folder in My Documents and moved a whack of fonts from control panel font folder into it.I had heard way back that too many fonts in that ctl font folder could slow things down.I had been in a font feeding frenzy and finally had to cull them.

Learned my lesson,only used a couple out of many,,so now in Win 7 I just have the default although I did have a free font of the day in my rss reader,but finally unsubscribed from it.

I heard that the trick is not to have so many load on startup,which means taking them out of cpl font folder and putting them,all not being used regularly, in a folder labeled Fonts somewhere else,My Documents in my case.I guess your results show that too many fonts in Win 7 can slow it down also.

Yes, How do you marked solved ? I looked but can't see an easy way,that sort of thing should be in your face so threads will get marked solved.I stopped looking.

 

[Lens Pirate]

Its great you solved the issue, you should also look to prevention.

Create a new account on the machine for her use and make it a restricted user that can not install or delete programs or system files.

or download, install and execute the latest version of Girlfrienddelete.exe version 2.0 64 bit.

 

[FuturDreamz]

ouch.
mass delete of anything that is used by the OS to run is never a good idea.

 

[Greg S]

Learned my lesson,only used a couple out of many,,so now in Win 7 I just have the default although I did have a free font of the day in my rss reader,but finally unsubscribed from it.

I heard that the trick is not to have so many load on startup,which means taking them out of cpl font folder and putting them,all not being used regularly, in a folder labeled Fonts somewhere else,My Documents in my case.I guess your results show that too many fonts in Win 7 can slow it down also.

Anyone know why Win 7 has installed all these foreign(to me) fonts? Are they needed for anything and can they be removed safely? I have 134 fonts listed in fonts folder and counted only 32 that are readable in the english language.

 

[logicearth]

Anyone know why Win 7 has installed all these foreign(to me) fonts? Are they needed for anything and can they be removed safely? I have 134 fonts listed in fonts folder and counted only 32 that are readable in the english language.

You could delete them if you want. However, that won't be required. Windows 7 actually introduces some better font management then previous versions. Fonts that are dimmed are disabled.