Kurt, I have read your article on Font Management and am convinced font conflicts with Office 2011 are causing problems. I am an ordinary user, not a graphics professional or techie. I had used font book to disable duplicates last fall, but on reading your article realized that it didn't necessarily disable the ones it should have, and there was an Office update since then which probably created more problems. I have already done the boot into Safe Mode. I have cleaned the font caches with Onyx periodically, reset user permissions and system permissions, and other cleaning/maintenance with Onyx.
I am fairly comfortable with finding things in the Libraries, deleting preferences etc, pasting commands into terminal etc., but the task of manually culling the duplicate/obsolete etc fonts is quite daunting. I am interested in using a font manager program to help me with this. FontExplorerX Pro and Suitcase, the programs that sound like they would be most helpful, are expensive and are really overkill for me. I downloaded a trial version of Font Explorer X Pro thinking I would clean house and then go back to Font Book, but then realized that to reinstall it I would need a full Lion install disk/drive, which I don't have for my mid-2011 Macbook Air.
I emailed Pacifist about whether you can run their program with the Lion Recovery disk on newer Macs shipped with Lion with no recovery/install flash drive. I had already created the recovery disk on an external USB hard drive with Recovery Disk Assistant, downloaded from the Apple site. (Who knows, maybe they developed a way to do this since you last updated your article.) I got this response from Pacifist:
Fortunately, it's possible to get a full Lion installer from Apple's site instead of the stripped down recovery disk; unfortunately, the process is a royal pain. But it is possible.
Here's a set of instructions:
http://www.macworld.com/article/1165337/create_a_bootable_lion_install_drive_for _newer_macs.html
I looked at the instructions and they are indeed very complicated. Apple does sell a recovery flash drive, but it's $70 (I'm not clear if this is for the newer or older version of Lion).
At this point I just want to complete a number of spreadsheets in Excel without it crashing and losing data, so I can finish my taxes. It doesn't seem like there is a way to resolve these font issues that isn't either really complicated and time-consuming or expensive. Not sure you can help me, but even so, I thought the info from Pacifist might be helpful to someone.