Expert: Amy - 9/25/2007

Question
hi amy, hope you're well. i've recently transferred my software from laptop to a new desktop running windows xp home. all functions on illustrator work fine apart from the text tool. every time i open a box to populate with characters, the program hangs and crashes. its strange that its just the text tool which isnt working. any suggestions

thanks in anticipation

Benedita

Answer
Hi Benedita,

Try a couple things:
1) Quit Illustrator then use the Windows search function to locate the file named AIprefs on your machine and delete it. It may be in a hidden folder, so include hidden files and folders in your search.

2) Then use Windows search to find all instances of files named adobefnt*.lst   throw them away. Include the wild card symbol in there like I have. There will be a lot of them. It is safe to delete them. Just make sure the ones you are throwing away are .lst files.

Then restart Illustrator. Your font lists and preferences will be rebuilt.

If this doesn't fix it, you may want to remove all the fonts (except the essential system fonts) from your Fonts folder and put them back a few at a time until you can re-create the problem. That's not fun - I recently had to do it.

I hope this helps you out!
Amy