I wanted to suggest an alternate fix. The UNC trick above works great, but annoyingly it won't let you use a popular tool for dealing with un-deletable files, Unlocker. (you can still run unlocker on a font file via the command prompt, but it's tedious)
A solution I found is to create a desktop.ini to put into your font folder, which forces it to behave like a normal folder.
- Make a new text document, call it desktop.txt or whatever.
- Copy and paste this to the text file:
[.ShellClassInfo]
[ViewState]
Mode=
Vid=
FolderType=Generic
- Save, close, and rename it to desktop.ini, then move that file C:\windows\fonts. You may be prompted to overwrite. Say yes, unless you want to first make a backup of the old desktop.ini.
- Close and re-open the windows font folder, and it should have a normal folder view. And you can right click and choose Unlocker, and it will run without issues.
Also, it may be helpful to understand that Windows tracks whether fonts are installed or not via a specific registry key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts
If the registry has entries for fonts that don't exist, you'll get problems. If it has an entry, but the entry points to the wrong file, you'll get problems. And finally, if you have a font in your font folder, but it doesn't exist in that registry list... you'll get problems. So try to straighten out that registry list, which is pretty self explanatory if you're comfortable with the registry.
The key has a bunch of string values, one for every font (and variant) you have installed. So for example the entry for Agency Bold is a string value that says
Agency FB Bold (TrueType)
And the data it contains is the filename of that font, AGENCYB_0.TTF.
Make sure that filename is correct.
And by the way, that _0 at the end of the filename means that at some point, you tried to copy the font (or install it) to the windows font folder, and a copy was already there... windows won't overwrite the older font, it will put in a second copy with a new name ending in _0, and then _1, _2, etc. You might have several copies of old fonts that gave you problems in the fast, and if you're careful you can clean these up and fix their registry entries.
1I ended up solving this by removing almost all fonts, restoring to another directory and installing them from there. It seems like it's a bad idea restoring font files directly to the Fonts folder.
But is there really no way to browse the Fonts folder? – Christian Davén – 2010-05-17T12:28:52.780