Check system fonts to resolve strange system issues

Jul 28, '05 09:15:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I rarely reboot my system, so I couldn't figure out what I did to my system to make it misbehave. Lots of applications were simply crashing or wouldn't open. I couldn't open Activity Monitor (it would quit), Terminal (wouldn't start), Safari, or Mail. Disk Utility, and other utilities, would crash. Some applications would work in safe mode, like Mail and Disk Utility, but others would get worse. I repaired permissions and couldn't think of anything else, so I started looking for solutions on the web (IE still worked).

There was nothing relevant, but one of the posts prompted my memory. The other day, I accidentally erased the Courier font using the Font book. I thought I was deleting duplicates, but in fact, I erased all copies. Since I don't use that font often, I thought I would reinstall it when the need arose. Somehow, I became convinced that that was the root of my problems. Sure enough, after reinstalling the fonts, everything went back to normal -- I didn't even need to reboot. I still can't believe that one font could cause so much trouble.

Perhaps somebody had a similar problem and posted the solution some place on the web. Unfortunately it didn't come up in my searches, since I only knew the symptoms and not the causes. Hopefully this will help...

[robg adds: As a general statement, bad things tend to happen when any of the core OS X fonts are disabled (or damaged or deleted). In some ways, Font Book actually makes it too easy to do this -- there have been lots of threads on various forums about seemingly bizarre system issues that are all eventually traced back to a missing system font...]

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