Lost fonts in Windows 95: now screwing up programs

richardb · June 8, 2002, 4:00am

Help!

Last night I ran Symantec’s testing program for the Kleg Virus on the machines in our office. It was not found on any of the four. I then installed Symantec’s Nortonm AntiVirus 2002.

On one of the older machines, running Windows 95, I now have a problem.

This problem may not be related to the Kleg Virus removal tool, but to run it I opened the machine in safe mode. After that, the fonts used for the desktop icons seemed to be missing. I couldn’t even install NAV 2002 because the OS is too old. But that’s another story.

Not only are all the desktop icons now taking up more space because it’s using a mono-spaced courrier font of some kind, but this affects all the menus inside any program. When I go to my desktop publishing software and click in the fonts menu, it is a fraction of the size it should be, so obviously most of the fonts are missing.

But wait, there’s more!

Two other things of potential significance.
One:

I have had a “font” problem with this computer for a long time, but it hasn’t been significant enough to aggressively seek help. It seems that just about every other time the computer is booted, some of the fonts are missing. Nothing that affects any of the actual programs or menus, etc., but for some desktop publishing stuff, etc., sometimes fonts will be substituted, and to correct this problem I just reboot, and the fonts have returned. I don’t know why, but perhaps this is the underlying problem. Since it’s easily corrected by rebooting, fixing it was never a high priority before.

Two:
When I now go to open Word or Excel, an error message pops up that says:

I have not been able to figure out how to “click Detect and Repair.” I cannot find any such command in any Excel menu (or in Excel Help), and I cannot figure out how to run Detect and Repair from within Windows. I am not sure this will in fact solve my problem, but I am certainly anxious to give it a try.

So:
Anyone know how to run “Detect and Repair”?
Anyone know another way to fix this problem?

If you’d like to know what I’ve tried so far (ignore the rest of this post if you do not need to know):

I went into Desktop properties to try and fix it there. No luck. My monitor is set to 768x1024 and 16 million colors. Clicking the “fonts” field gives the choice of large or small, and I’m using small.

I also tried to physically see if the fonts were actually there, using Windows Explorer. Apparently there are two different places where fonts are on this hard drive. Most are in c:/windows/fonts. These are for the most part all True Type fonts, about 1300 of them, including Tahoma. This sounds about right. The second place is a folder I think I made for installing Type 1 fonts, in a folder just called “f”. It’s not a drive, but based on ancient problems long long ago before long file names and paths were available, calling the folder “f” keeps the path name as short as possible. Anyways, in c:/f/ there are about 54 *.pfb files and a folder called “pfm” and in c:/f/pfm/ there are 56 *.pfm files.

Is there some place in the registry or the win.ini file or something where I need to tell windows where the fonts are?

Thanks in advance for any Doper help y’all can give.

Melon_Farmer · June 8, 2002, 8:26am

Ho ho. I know this problem. I’ve seen this on two Windows 9x machines (one 95 and one 98) and I tried everything I could think of. I restored the font files manually, automatically, searched the knowledge base for literally hours. In the end I had to re-install windows in both cases, and I supposedly know something about this stuff. :rolleyes:

Anyway, you can try the two q articles listed, but I gotta tell you, from my experience, it doesn’t look good. Also 1300 fonts is an awful lot for Windows to manage, you’ll need a font manager like Adobe if you plan on running a Windows system with that many fonts. I would strongly suggest upgrading to Windows 2000 or XP if your system can handle it.

Good luck.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q138795

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q152974

triad · June 8, 2002, 12:55pm

I had a similar problem with Win95 a couple years ago. If you log the boot up, you’ll probably find that the missing fonts aren’t loading. If I remember right, mine were corrupted, and the only way to get around the problem was to go into DOS and manually delete the corrupted fonts, then reinstall them later. I had other problems, too, including a soundcard that would quit loading after awhile, until I either physically removed it, or reformatted the entire machine…which I did often.

My solution: I bought a new machine.

galen · June 8, 2002, 1:36pm

I would format and reinstall.

richardb · June 11, 2002, 11:33am

Here’s the latest:

I am trying to avoid wiping everything clean. This computer has worked well enough for about 5 years now, and I’m just trying to get it back to where it was a week ago!

Another friend told me that he had this sort of a problem once and it came after installing too many fonts. He suggested keeping the number below 1024 (a common threshhold number for computers).

I made a temporary/copied fonts directory, and went into Windows Explorer to copy then delete a bunch of fonts from the c:/windows/fonts directory.

Interestingly enough, the tools/menus of Windows Explorer change when inside the fonts directory. There is no “delete” toolbar button as is usually there, for example. There is an “install new font” menu item. The “delete” command is under the File menu. Since the other commands are obviously font-specific, I guess this is the proper way to “uninstall” a font.

I deleted over 350 fonts from the folder. Now when I open the Fonts icon from the Control Panel, the number of fonts is down to under 500 (it was something over 700 before). In the /windows/fonts directory in Windows Explorer, there are 970 objects listed instead of over 1300.

This has not helped. Same problem. Same “Tahoma font not present” error message when I open Word or Excel.

While copying the fonts to the temporary directory (on a different drive) and then deleting them from the /windows/fonts directory, I did run across something odd a couple of times. I copied-then-deleted groups of fonts at a time to try and keep track of what I was doing, like all the ones starting with “News” one time, and the ones starting with “Geometric” one time, etc. The groups were usually 10 or 12 at a time, with some as few as 3 or 4 and one or two as much as 31 at once. Anyways, two or three times when copying the fonts before deleting them, it said a file by that name already existed. It seems a few fonts had the same file name! I don’t know if this is significant at all.

By the way, I found some kind of Microsoft Repair Utility file on the hard drive, and when I tried to run it, discovered it is a repair utility for Office 2000. Figured I’d run the repair utility to see if it would help, but halfway through it asked me to insert the Office 2000 disk, and I can’t find it! I had two of them, but I am not organized enough to find either one right now.

Is there a chance that the Office 2000 Repair Utility would help? Is it worth spending a lot of time and effort to find (or borrow) the disk, or is it not likely this would help anyways?

Melon Farmer, thanks for the advice. I did check out both those articles you linked to, and even a third page one of the first two linked to, but all to no avail. The most promising was the tip to delete a font called “Monotype Sorts True Type font” which apparently causes what seems like my exact problem. Unfortunately, I have no such font, so I can’t delete it!

Another article explains how to use the “Restore Windows Files” option. I was wary of this because apparently it “replaces files that are missing or have changed since the last time you ran setup” and I was worried that other files may have updated, etc. in the last five years, but I went ahead and ran it anyways (I do still have the original Win95 disk). Unfortunately, Setup would not run; I get an error message saying that some changes were made to the control panel and I need to save those changes and reboot and then run Setup again, but no matter how many times I reboot, Setup still gives me the same error message and does not reboot.

Unless someone thinks of something better to try, I think I will attempt triad’s suggestion next. Only I’m not exactly sure how.

How do I “log the boot up” to find out which fonts are not being loaded?

How do I reinstall the system kind of fonts that are on the Windows 95 CD somewhere? Or is there another source for the Windows-standard fonts I can access to re-install them?

Do I really have to delete them first, or will re-installing a font write over the old version? And if they have to be deleted first, do I really have to do it from DOS? Will deleting them the way I just described not do the trick?

Thanks for everyones’s suggestions.

richardb · June 11, 2002, 12:08pm