I then accessed my last full Backup for the Mac in question and copied over these two folders - effectively restoring them to the condition they were before I overloaded FB. I booted from a backup OS to allow access to the system, went to the user / library / and removed the folders 'Fonts' and 'FontCollections' (this latter being the source files for the individual collection sets within your FB. This meant that on restart, FB was attempting to reload them all once again. sure enough before the force quit, FB had imported thousands of fonts into the folder and of course they were still there. Reading Kurt's posts again I caught the point ' too many fonts for FB to handle' and checked the user / library / fonts. Solution: Having read these posts I initially did the safe mode database / cache clear which cured Safari but did not resolve FB. Photoshop) and Safari had defaulted to a very weird display font.

The fonts it did show as active were not loading within applications (e.g. After a reboot, FB was slow to launch and would no longer add or delete any fonts. FB began to import all of these fonts! At 3,700+ I force quit it to stop the process. I went to load a new font and whilst very tired inadvertantly double clicked my personal font collection archive on an external drive. I had one personal collection with just 8 fonts loaded.

Problem cause: I had minimal fonts in Font Book except the / Library/ Fonts which are available in FB via the All Fonts collection.

FontBook (FB) only used as a font handler on this Mac. Mac / OS: Leopard 10.5.8 on a 2008 Core2Duo iMac. Kurt and ahbin's posts have helped solve my problem so for the sake of others here is my particular problem / solution.

Font book not installing fonts