Freeze when sorting font list on startup

[Martin Joergensen]

My Photoshop 7, which has worked flawlessly for months, will not start any more. When it initializes it never gets beyond the point where it says: sorting font list in the splash dialog. Here it freezes and not even my Windows XP task manager can get rid of it.

I have reinstalled the program and upgraded to 7.01, but to no avail. It still freezes.

Any suggestions?

[Mel Brown]

You may have a corrupted font or just too many of them. Do Start>Control Panel>Fonts to check it out. Not sure how many "too many" is, but anything over 800-1000 should raise red flags.

If you have "too many," create a sister folder named Fonts.Limbo or whatever, then use Windows Explorer to copy the entire current set from C:\Windows\Fonts to the new folder. Then, use the Fonts applet in Control Panel to select and delete groups of them to determine whether the high count is the problem. Later, you can use the Fonts applet to reinstall whichever ones you choose from the Fonts.Limbo folder.

[Mel Brown]

If you decide to delete some of your fonts, check out <http://www.onescrappysite.com/fonts/donotdelete.htm> for a list of those you should not delete.

[Martin Joergensen]

Mel,

Thanks for you input, but it seems I might have solved the problem already. I do not have many fonts - 100 at the most, or not even that many. But I renamed all AdobeFnt.lst files on my system and tried to restart Photoshp. Same thin happened, but this time I let it work all night an presto! This morning Photoshop was up and working. Now I will do my chores before I restart the program to see whether it actually solved the problem for good or I just have a corrupted font.

Thanks again for your advice

Martin

[Mel Brown]

Excellent, Martin. Seems it wasn't totally frozen, but just thinking very deeply, hmmm? [:-)