Could too many FONTS be slowing down program loading?

It very much could be. I haven't used 2011, but the other versions need to load and process all the fonts so that they can create the stylized font menu. If you've got a lot of fonts installed, then it has to go through them all, first.

Now, I'm not sure if Excel has a menu like that, but it may still load all the fonts on startup. Word has the option in General prefs to turn off the WYSIWYG font menu.

However, both Word and Excel (2008) load in a few seconds on my machine. I toggled the WYSIWYG font menu in Word and didn't see a noticeable difference.

If you have a lot of fonts additional to the ones that came with the Mac, you really should use a font manager to keep them controlled. Any fonts added to your three Fonts folders will be automatically active in memory and available to all programs at all times. You would likely be better off only activating fonts when you need them. You can deactivate fonts in Font Book, but I'd recommend something like FontExplorer or FontAgent.

Matt

Stephen --
You should be fine.
If you're a home user, not a professional designer, 240 is not "too many" fonts, normally.

I would, however, open up Font Book, and get rid of any duplicate fonts.

Message was edited by: ~Bee

With having 200+ fonts activated, it takes my older MacPro 1.1 approximately 6 seconds to open Excel 2011. No restart.
After doing the above and closing Excel, it takes about 2 seconds to have a workbook open after double clicking on it.

240 fonts is a very small number. Office 2008 installed 70 fonts. Allegedly Office 2011 installs 100 (I haven't installed 2011 and have no intention of so doing unless and until Microsoft sends me a free copy, which ain't gonna happen.) There are 1367 fonts in my Font Folder, and that is trimmed down from the well over 8,000 fonts available elsewhere. I used to use a font manager (first Suitcase, in the days when I worked for a newspaper, which is where I got most of those fonts, then Linotype Font Explorer) but I've not bothered with one for years now. If I ever needed a font manager again I'd probably go with LFX. Note that Apple's Font Book is not, repeat, NOT a font manager. It ain't ready for prime time and probably never will be.

240 fonts should not slow your system down noticeably. My machine loads Word 2008 in under 50 seconds from go, and that's with 1367 fonts. If Word ever took 120 seconds to load on your system there's likely to be something else causing it, most likely either a bad font or low memory or both.

It's not that that is a large number , but fonts can be problematic - I would look at whether there are duplicates that might be causing issues - this can slow things down.

If you launch a program for the first time after restarting your computer it has to load the program completely from the hard drive. If you have previously launched the program since restarting the program may or may not be cached in memory and may not need to be completely reload from the hard drive. The second and subsequent launchings should be faster it the contents are cached in memory.

See the Inactive Memory discussion in this link: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342.