anyone know how to disable some of the 246 system fonts?

Before disabling any System Fonts be aware it may cause problems as the OS relies on being able to find certain fonts to operate properly, although I confess I'm not sure what particular fonts they are.

Launch Font Book in the Applications folder and from the Edit menu there is the option to enable/disable fonts selectively (or totally - best not to choose that option).

Tread carefully 😉.

Unless I'm missing something, you can turn fonts off using the method I described in my first post. So far as I'm aware they are only fonts that were installed along with the OS as I haven't got any Adobe stuff on my Mac, so I'm assuming they're the Apple supplied fonts. If I select the 'All fonts' option it tells me I have 270 installed - not 246, but close(ish):

I no longer work in the graphics industry so it's been a few years since I needed a font management solution when using AdobeCS, QuarkXpress, et al, but when I did I used Suitcase - which has since become Suitcase Fusion. Did a great job of keeping control of my fonts and would open the fonts a particular job needed on the fly. No doubt there are other options available, but I'm a bit out of touch as to what they might be.

http://www.extensis.com/suitcase-fusion/

I was just chatting with Apple and they say I can't turn them off.

Baloney. If you know the admin password, you can remove as many of them as you want. There's just certain ones you must have enabled at all times. See my article:

Font Management in OS X

Since you're using FontAgent Pro, it's important to get rid of Font Book. See the last part of section 6 on how to do that. Having more than one font manager on your system at a time is a no-no. It involves removing the Font Book app itself, and then clearing it's database via a Safe Mode boot.

These are all of the fonts I ever have permanently enabled in Mountain Lion. The rest are removed from the drive. I do first copy them to another location so I can enable them with my font manager whenever I want. Some I just plain get rid of. I have no use for Braille or Kanji fonts.

System:

Apple Color Emoji.ttf

Courier.dfont

Geneva.dfont

Helvetica.dfont

HelveticaNeue.dfont

HelveticaNeueDeskUI.ttc

Keyboard.ttf

LastResort.ttf

LucidaGrande.ttc

MarkerFelt.ttc

Menlo.ttc

Monaco.dfont

Symbol.ttf

Times.dfont

ZapfDingbats.ttf

Library:

AppleGothic.ttf

Arial Black.ttf

Arial Bold Italic.ttf

Arial Bold.ttf

Arial Italic.ttf

Arial Narrow Bold Italic.ttf

Arial Narrow Bold.ttf

Arial Narrow Italic.ttf

Arial Narrow.ttf

Arial Rounded Bold.ttf

Arial.ttf

Comic Sans MS Bold.ttf

Comic Sans MS.ttf

Georgia Bold Italic.ttf

Georgia Bold.ttf

Georgia Italic.ttf

Georgia.ttf

Impact.ttf

Tahoma Bold.ttf

Tahoma.ttf

Times New Roman Bold Italic.ttf

Times New Roman Bold.ttf

Times New Roman Italic.ttf

Times New Roman.ttf

Trebuchet MS Bold Italic.ttf

Trebuchet MS Bold.ttf

Trebuchet MS Italic.ttf

Trebuchet MS.ttf

Verdana Bold Italic.ttf

Verdana Bold.ttf

Verdana Italic.ttf

Verdana.ttf

Webdings.ttf

Wingdings 2.ttf

Wingdings 3.ttf

Wingdings.ttf

I never keep anything in the Fonts folder of my user account. All other fonts I need to turn on or off is done through Suitcase Fusion 5.

I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link..

I can't get safe boot to work.

Safe Mode should always work. You may be letting go of the shift key too early, or pressing it too late.

Restart again and hold the shift key down as soon as the gray shut down screen goes away. Don't even wait for the Mac to chime before pressing the key. Then, don't let go until you see a progress bar at the lower part of the gray startup screen below the Apple logo.

That's doesn't sound good. Part of a Safe Mode boot is the underlying Unix system runs the fsck command (short for File System ChecK). It may be running into a part of the file system it can't fix and it kicks out.

Restart again and hold down Command+R to boot into Recovery Mode. Once at that abbreviated desktop, launch Disk Utility and select your main startup drive at the left. Click Repair Disk. Does it return any errors?

not just now...about an hour ago.

Ah, sorry, should've thought of that.

Very, very odd that a Safe Mode boot won't finish. The main reason for doing that is it clears the abandoned Font Book database. Even without the Font Book app on the drive, the database still tries to tell the OS which fonts are, or aren't active, so it gets in the way of your preferred font manager by fighting for control of those fonts.

In the meantime, have you removed Font Book? If so, then do the next step and manually remove all fonts you don't want in the System folder, or the root Library folder. Then clear the font cache files.

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

Terminal will then ask for your admin password. As you type, it will not show anything, so be sure to enter it correctly.

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

The genius should be looking for a new job, given his string of incorrect answers.

He is partially correct that you can't disable the fonts from Font Book. Specifically, it won't let you disable or remove any of them whose location is in the System folder. But it can disable any fonts in the root Library folder, or those which are in your user account. There is nothing though stopping you from manually removing any you don't want from any location on the drive.

He is completely wrong that a particular model doesn't support a Safe Mode boot. Every Mac that has ever had OS X installed on it does. Certainly one such as yours that is new enough to run Mountain Lion.