Corrupt font book & spinning wheel of death means I can't access my desktop! HELP!!!

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Level 1

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Corrupt font book & spinning wheel of death means I can't access my desktop! HELP!!!

I hope someone can help as this is driving me CRAZY!!!

I am running Mac OS X 10.6.8 on my mac and earlier installed some fonts to font book - which appears to have corrupted the font book. I am frozen out of my desktop. I can ONLY log in using safe boot to access my desktop. If I try my usual log in, all I get is the spinning wheel of death!!! Aargghhh!! It's proving a problem as I can't access any of my servers using the safe boot.

Really hope someone can help!!

Thanks,

Lee

Posted on Sep 14, 2011 6:17 AM

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Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

239,363 points

Sep 14, 2011 1:43 PM in response to Leecallan

Lee, does Fontbook run in Safe mode to verify Fonts & check for duplicates?

You need to remove those Fonts you installed.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2435

http://www.prepressure.com/fonts/basics/snow-leopard-fonts/list

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Answer 2

Kurt Lang

Level 9

58,296 points

Sep 14, 2011 1:53 PM in response to Leecallan

What BDAqua said. Get those crummy fonts you added off the drive. At least one of them must be so bad that's it's corrupting RAM every time the system tries to load it.

A Safe Mode boot removes the user cache files of the account you log into in Safe Mode, and clears Font Book's database. Normally, that would allow you to restart normally since Font Book's database is not rebuilt until you launch Font Book. That you can't even get that far means you have some really BAD fonts.

Boot into Safe Mode again. Make a new folder on the desktop and move all of the fonts you added out of the /Library/Fonts/ folded, or the Fonts folder of your user account. Whichever one you put them in.

Now you should be able to startup normally.

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