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Background:

I have Windows 8.1. Whenever I reboot, I have to reinstall all of my fonts. The only fonts that do appear in the Windows Font Viewer prior to reinstallation are vgafix.fon, vgaoem.fon, and vgasys.fon. (This is an educated guess, since I copy and pasted them from the garbled Font Viewer window to C:\ and looked at the font file names in cmd.exe.)

Before reinstalling all my fonts, the names beneath icons and the program menus are all garbage characters, like this (this is not my computer, but is the exact same problem

image.

No new apps or programs were installed corresponding to the onset of this problem. I did, however, install some fonts for a video editing (Premiere Pro CC 7) project.

Anyway, after some digging, I have found that in registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts there is no reference to segoui.ttf, which looks to be the font I need to install to read stuff.

The problem:

When I go to add specific strings to this key, e.g. "Segoe UI (TrueType)", list of fonts in above key,

I am told that the string already exists, even though it doesn't show in the key listing: error message after attempt to add string

If I wanted to name it, say, "Segoe UI" or "random_text" I have no problem.

Questions:

  • Does anyone know what's going on here?
  • Is there any way to fix main problem of not having my fonts install on boot that doesn't involve restoring/refreshing my system/upgrading to Windows 10/etc.? (I have software that I have apparently lost the installers for.)
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  • How are you "reinstalling" the fonts?
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented Nov 18, 2017 at 19:38
  • @Mokubai I have the Windows 8.1 default fonts in a folder on my desktop. After the computer is booted, I do a Select All on the fonts and hit enter. Windows does whatever it does to "install" the fonts according to the status window. Afterward, the system looks completely normal.
    – Bort
    Commented Nov 18, 2017 at 19:54
  • @schadjo When you open a font in Windows font viewer, it "installs" the font temporarily.
    – Agent_L
    Commented Feb 25, 2020 at 8:22

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I exported the existing (uneditable) Fonts key, deleted Fonts from the registry, and rebooted without said key. (I had to reboot several times, because the desktop would refresh every second or so on the first few reboots, preventing me from running any programs or clicking any icons.)

When I was finally able to add the Fonts registry back in and reboot, the missing Segoe UI fonts had all been populated and I could edit them freely.

The computer is acting just fine now. Still no idea what the root cause is/was.

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  • 1
    Apparently a corrupted copy of font Avenir caused this problem. I got the font from a graphic designer who had no issue with it, but when I install it, I can reproduce the problem. Given that this is not a font included with Windows, I am still not clear on why it caused a problem.
    – Bort
    Commented Nov 29, 2017 at 20:29

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