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Restoring Windows fonts (1 Viewer)

Ellen

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Jan 8, 2000
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Real Name
Ellen
I don't know how I did it but I seem to have trashed the default Windows fonts on my computer. I mean stuff like Times New Roman and Arial. Everything looks different than it used to. The only thing I did that I think could have caused a problem was uninstalling Office 97 (using Add/Remove Programs). I tried reinstalling it to see if that would fix things. Got a weird message that said the install was unable to register some SNG file, but otherwise the reinstall seemed to complete. However the fonts are still missing.

Can any of you tell me how I go about restoring the default Windows 98SE fonts? I've poked thru the help but to no avail.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
 

Rob Gillespie

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Aug 17, 1998
Messages
3,632
I think I would try this:
  • Copy all of the font files in WindowsFonts out to another directory
  • Delete everything in WindowsFonts. It will probably whine about not being able to delete one of the fonts (when I tested it it moaned about 'Marlett'). Leave that one and delete the rest.
  • Copy all of the font files back into WindowsFonts
  • Reboot
I've just tried this on my second machine and all the fonts reinstalled OK.
 

Ellen

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Jan 8, 2000
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142
Real Name
Ellen
Rob,

The problem seemed to be that the fonts were actually missing from the WINDOWSFONTS directory. I ended up digging out the Windows installation CD and getting the required .ttf files from one of the CAB files on the CD. Seem to be back in business now.

Thanks for your help!

Ellen
 

Rob Gillespie

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Aug 17, 1998
Messages
3,632
Office will install a number of fonts so when you deinstall it makes sense that you lost some of them, though I'm very surprised that it managed to mangle baseline stuff such as Ariel and Times. It sounds like Windows didn't really keep track of what fonts it did and did not have.

Anyway, glad you've got it sorted out.
 

Glenn Overholt

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Mar 24, 1999
Messages
4,201
I'm bringing this one back up. Ellen, I thought that was really strange about your fonts - - until this morning when I booted up. My PC went into safe mode, but I had no tray, icons, or even a mouse.

I rebooted with step-by-step and it told me right off that I had to run scanreg.exe, but I looked at the startup txt files because one of them was over 2k. It was full of errors that it could not find this font, and there was a long list of them.

It is ok now, but I'm only wondering why this happened in the first place.

Glenn
 

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