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I am an idiot. Who would have thought that installing 2 gigs of fonts would be detrimental to the boot up time for the most common design programs such as adobe illustrator. I would like to restore the font folder because I am no longer able to just delete the fonts. It takes too long. So when I right-click the fonts folder and select "Restore Previous Versions" I am able to find a restore point, but the "Restore" button is greyed out. this leads me to think that I cannot change the settings of files in the windows directory.

Oh and there are 34,000 fonts I need gone.

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If you're running with a computer-administrator account, then anything that requires elevated privileges to do should give you that option, possibly behind a UAC prompt. I therefore consider it unlikely that you lack required permissions (although you could try enabling the Administrator account, booting in safe mode, and doing the restore with that if you want to make sure). It is more likely that the restore point doesn't cover the details of what was and was not in your system font store.

One option would be to take the fonts that came with your system and place them in a temporary location, then delete the entire contents of your system font store (isn't ctl+A, shift+del wonderful?), and then drop the default font-set back in in their place. This would require a considerable amount of effort to manually select each font file, but it should be less than selecting and deleting thirty-four thousand a few at a time. If you go this route, Microsoft provide lists of the fonts that come with their products (both Windows versions and extra software like Office) by version, which will make finding the ones to back up somewhat easier.

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  • Hey thanks for the response! I will answer back when I see the results. Unfortunately deleting 18,153 fonts (30k in sub-folders) takes a while and there's always that off chance that this won't work. Edit: I just answered "yes" to the prompt asking me if I really wanted to delete the fonts (10 minutes after I pressed shift+delete). It seems like something is happening even though I see nothing happening in the font directory because my cpu is at 52% usage.
    – ryalho
    Commented Mar 30, 2012 at 17:19
  • Nothing was deleted :/
    – ryalho
    Commented Mar 30, 2012 at 17:43
  • That's... surprising. Did you get an error message that might help diagnose what's going on?
    – Darael
    Commented Mar 30, 2012 at 18:33
  • No. I didn't receive an error. I waited 10 minutes to execute the action then another 10 for it to do nothing. During this whole process, my cpu was up 50% usage. Toward the end the cpu maxed out for a bit.
    – ryalho
    Commented Mar 30, 2012 at 19:35
  • Also, I know I can shift-a the mass and delete :P I'm not computer illiterate. The thing is, I had already tried deleting the directory files but to no avail I thought perhaps I could at least delete one font! This worked, but each time I deleted one of the fonts the directory had to refresh itself. Which I found odd. EDIT: I'm going to try booting into safe mode.
    – ryalho
    Commented Mar 30, 2012 at 19:41

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