Somehow, the font on the Windows Lock/Login screen changed, and I can no longer sign in to any user on that device because it simply resets to the Lock screen. My best guess on the specifics is that the changed font lacks the symbols that Windows uses, as the few glimpses I have of them - the colon in the time and brief flashes of the Login screen's bottom-right symbols - are all what appears to be an "invalid character" fallback, which is a rectangle that's taller than it is wide.
In case it is relevant, the font appears to be Holly Script or Quigley Wiggly. I have attempted searching through the registry and the C:\Windows\Fonts directory for those fonts and have not found it, and my attempts to ensure that the appropriate Windows font - Segoe UI - is there have returned what appears to be normal conditions despite them clearly not being so.
I honestly have no clue how the font was changed in the first place; my best guess is that my pet cats walked on the keyboard. The keyboard is a fancier keyboard with backlighting and the option to map macros, and I think the cats created at least one macro in the past by walking on the keyboard. The accompanying mouse "drifts" due to it being a cheaper RGB-light mouse, so theoretically something could've occurred in relation to that as well.
I've attempted to go into the Registry to reset the fonts back to Segoe and went through a list of various Segoe fonts that should be there, ensured that there is no FontSubstitutes for any Segoe-related font, and even attempted to create new FontSubstitutes for Holly Script, Holly Script Normal, Holly-Script, and QuigleyWiggly that all point back to Segoe UI in an attempt to get the font reverted. I cannot seem to access Settings or the Control Panel from Safe Mode to attempt a font change there.
Recovery Point data seems to be corrupt, as the three recovery points have all resulted in failure to recover.
So far the only options remaining that I am aware of are to Reset my PC, or to Reinstall Windows. I am looking to avoid losing installed applications, data, and the like if at all possible, and so I am trying to know all my options. My question on Answers.Microsoft has not resulted in me getting any other options beyond those.
If there's any other options that I can try before resorting to resetting/reinstalling Windows, then please let me know. Alternatively, if there's a way to keep the various applications and data while doing so (without offloading the data to another drive and back) then being informed of that would be nice as well, but my main concern is knowing my options in the first place.
In case it's relevant, the data on the harddrive of the PC in question has been brought through a couple iterations, including being upgraded from a prior Windows 7 install that itself was upgraded from a previous version, though the hardware was swapped out in the meantime. It's my "family PC" and so it's been used by a bunch of different people in the past years, but of the three that have had access to it for the past few months none of us used it for anything more than Chrome.
Finally, I genuinely have no clue how the font even got onto the PC. I've not intentionally downloaded any fonts (though they may have come with some other application), and my attempts to use where.exe (through command line) to locate "Holly Script" and "Quigley" have provided no results for either barring "Hollywood" within files for an application by Pinnacle Studios.
If there's any other potentially-relevant information that I have left out, please let me know. Tag suggestions would also be appreciated, as I neither know all the tags nor if the ones I have selected are truly appropriate.
