[adamlink]

I am having trouble with certain system fonts, those that end in the .fon extension. They do not show right in any programs that call on them. Numbers show fine, but letters show up only as zeroes. However, all .ttf fonts show up fine.

At first, I thought the fonts were corrupt, so I reinstalled all of my .fon fonts from the installation disk, but that did not resolve the issue.

I looked at each of these fonts and noticed two strange things:
1. The copyright for the font was changed to the Syriac Computing Institute.
2. All of the letters on the font's page are zero, but the numbers are fine.
Then I checked all of my other .fon files, and everyone seems to have been rewritten this way. This even includes a font that came with a program that I have been using for several years, that also ends in .fon.

Attached is a copy of the page I get when I click on one of the system fonts.

So I next used my original Windows installation disk to reinstall all of those fonts. But when I looked at them afterwards, they looked exactly the same.

Next, just to be sure it wasn't the installation disk, I checked the CAB files that contain the .fon files. When I checked them on a computer at work, they were fine, showing the Microsoft copyright, and showing the proper font set. But when I looked at the CAB files on the disk on my own computer, it showed them all as being the Syriac version of the files. So I know it is whatever is using the fonts, not the fonts themselves.

I deleted the font cache and rebooted the computer, and of course there was a new font cache when I checked. But that did not resolve the issue.

Next, I tried re-extracting the fontext.dll from the installation disk, but that did not resolve the issue either.

I have also re-extrated the fontviewer.exe file from my installation disk, but that did not help either.

So far, I have only seen it affect two programs. One is the above mentioned software with its own .fon file. The other, as you can see in the second attachment, is the splash screen for Paintshop Pro (note the word Version is only zero's on the other attachment), but I'm sure it will show up with other problems as time goes on.

I have a Windows 98SE operating system on a Pentium 4 computer, with a 512 Meg rambus, and a 200 gig hard drive.

My font folder is rather full...I have over 950 fonts. I had about 30 more, but deleted some thinking maybe this was the problem, but apparently not.

Any other suggestions short of reinstalling my operating system?

I want to upgrade to Windows XP, but am afraid to do so right now as I may just bring the problem with me into XP.

Zane

[SICS]

That font is corrupt, you will need to extract the font from Windows 98 cd, if you however choose to upgrade to XP, the issue will be fixed.

[adamlink]

I resolved the problem, but in a rather unexpected way.

I noticed that about a dozen of my TTF fonts were also showing that they were manufactured by the same Syriac Institute that was popping up on my system font descriptions. So I deleted all of those TTF fonts.

Amazingly, my system fonts all went back to normal. When I look at them with fontview.exe, they no longer say anything about Syriac Institute, and the programs that access them now can use them again.

So it was not my Font folder that was corrupt, nor my system fonts. It appears that one or more of those TTF fonts were corrupt and were disrupting my system.

[SICS]

Glad to see you have the problem fixed, and thanks for sharing on how you fixed the issue!