Missing font file, dialogues not in readable characters

The characters in the image you linked to are produced by the Last Resort font.

I was warned of a font conflict that advised me to trash Lucida Grande.

The OS produced a message telling you to trash Lucida Grande?!

Lucida Grande is the most important font in OS X. It is used for all OS X menus and many other areas. You should not even have been able to delete it, as there is a buried copy of it, which the OS will immediately copy back to the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder if you remove the one that's already there.

Check to see if there is a copy of Lucida Grande in the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder. There should be. I don't know where you found a copy of that font online, but where did you install it? If you put it in the /Library/Fonts/ folder, or the Fonts folder of your user account, then you have created a font conflict with the Lucida Grande font in the System folder.

Remove the downloaded font you installed for starters. It may not even be Apple's version, which contains special characters specific to OS X menus.

Hi D,

You would be better following the guide called Font Management in OS X, by Kurt Lang.
Google for it and you will be done, it is long but consistent and you will be fine after that, since missing system fonts can really bring a low performance.

Good luck.

Hi K,

Did you noticed I hadn't see you were already around?

Sorry about that, guys.

Regards, K.

I've installed a (perhaps) third-party version of Lucida Grande (which I did just by opening the font in Font Book and installing),..

Okay, this makes more sense now. When you installed the third party font, by its default settings, Font Book copied that version of Lucida Grande to the Fonts folder in your user account. So you do indeed have a conflict between that font, and the one in the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder.

...but this is definitely the same warning that I was given right after the upgrade to 10.6.

Which could only mean there was already a second copy of Lucida Grande on the drive in either the /Library/Fonts/ folder, or the Fonts folder of your user account. If in the latter, then you still have just the two. If the former, you may have three separate copies of Lucida Grande on your Mac. The two that were not installed by OS X need to go.

Remove Lucida Grande from these two folders:

/Library/Fonts/
~/Library/Fonts/ (the tilde ~ means the home account you are logged into)

That should leave just the one copy of Lucida Grande in the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder.

After that, clear the font cache files from the system.

Close all running applications. From an administrator account, open the Terminal app and enter the following command. You can also copy/paste it from here into the Terminal window:

sudo atsutil databases -remove

This removes all font cache files. Both for the system and all user font cache files. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.

Please report back with the results.

As of now, I haven't responded to the conflicts (one for Lucida Grande.ttf, one for the bold version)...

Both will clear up at the same time. A .ttc font can contain more than one typeface. So the normal and bold versions of Lucida Grande are actually both within the same file.

You're welcome! 🙂