Mac Forum / Applications / Word / April 2006

We use two OpenType fonts - Minion Pro and HelveticaNeue LT (both from
adobe).  We have several machines, and none have had problems with
these fonts in past.  Recently a new Macintel iMac running 10.4.6 OS X
has begun to behave oddly.

Whenever these two fonts are available to OS X (e.g. in /Library/Fonts)
the machine works fine, Word works fine (displaying correctly in Word
etc.) until you try and save the file.  Any attempt to save a file on
this particular machine which uses either of these two fonts causes
Word to stall just at the start of the Save process - with a little bit
of the blue progress line showing, after it has asked about replacing
existing file (if there is one).  Two times out of three, the next step
is for not only Word to crash, but also to force OS X back to the login
screen (i.e. logging out the user).

Removing the fonts, restarting OS X reliably fixes the problem.

Mindful of other postings, I've tried most of the fixes for font
problems suggested (resetting cache with Onyx, deleting Word Font
Cache, removing the Word Font helper app, running safe mode, fixing dud
fonts with Font Doctor [there were not any] etc.) and all seem to work
as well as they do for others - addressing some of the symptoms
temporarily, but not fixing problem.  Removing fonts is a much more
reliable (but impracticable) solution.  We have an identical macintel
imac with basically the same configuration that does not show any of
these problems.  Several other macs also with these fonts also work
fine.  Indeed this faulty machine worked fine for a while until the
problem started.

This suggests the problem is configuration based - somewhere there is a
file with the wrong stuff in.  But which one...?

Any ideas / suggestions welcomed.

Gavin Lawrie