Corrupted fonts cause iCal and Finder problems

Nov 19, '02 08:27:57AM

Contributed by: mc717990

I was having some problems loading iCal; it kept quitting on me, with no information really with regards to a cause. Then, after it had quit, Aqua and my whole desktop would restart itself. The computer wouldn't restart, just the desktop. I found later that this occurred in other places too, like when I was trying to mount a WebDAV drive.

After doing some digging, it seems it was listed as a font problem. After working and working through, trying to find the fonts, what I discovered was that I had some bad fonts in the system. I found this when I tried to launch the actual application from the command line, and it gave me much better error output. I went through, cleaned out some extra fonts that had been put in there, and that fixed some of my problems. iCal was still crashing though.

After doing some digging, it turns out that in the /Library -> Fonts folder, HelveticaNeue.dfont had been corrupted and iCal depends on this file. I removed the file and copied a version over from a friend's machine. Voila, iCal started working, and so did the rest of my system, without any more crashes.

The hint here is that when you have problems with your system, crashing or otherwise, check your font files. You may be having problems because of bad fonts. I've posted a directory listing of what seems to be a valid set of fonts. Feel free to verify it against your own directory; this is current as of OS X 10.2.2.

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