Website content in browsers is screwed up after installing fonts

In a preliminary step for some design work I'm embarking on, I installed a large group of fonts onto my computer. I'd downloaded these from a variety of sites over time. The installation involved about 25 new font groups, some that have up to 20 fonts within.

After the installation, I noticed something very peculiar. Some websites started to display very strangely, especially eBay. I didn't get any message that the fonts being installed were replacing any existing fonts. So I went in to the fonts view and performed "hide" for all the fonts I'd added. No change. Next, I decided it best to just delete them all. That did NOT help.

I found Brink's tutorial on rebuilding the font cache and performed that. That didn't help either.

Now I'm completely baffled about what to do next. Should I just delete ALL fonts in the folder and re-copy all the fonts I'd saved from my backup computer? The backup doesn't have any of those new fonts I'd just installed.

OK, I think I figured it out. Somehow after I'd deleted "Helvetica Neue", it reappeared. And that font is somehow in the font selection order in various sites like eBay (I checked the font family list in the HTML source). When I deleted it, for some reason Windows got rid of only some of the fonts within the group. The large bold italic ones were still there. And that was causing this mess.

The only way I could seem to get rid of that "Helvetica Neue" family completely was to go into command line mode and manually delete the fonts. I then immediately ran the font rebuild cache batch file, then rebooted.

When I went back into Chrome, the fonts looked much, much better. One font is showing a little larger than it used to but for the most part everything else looks perfectly normal.


In any case, I'm wondering if a "font mess" situation can be remedied by doing the following:

1. Go into command line and delete all fonts from the %windir%/fonts folder.
2. Copy over the backup set of fonts to the %windir%/fonts folder.
3. Run the font rebuild cache batch file.
4. Reboot.
Would this generally work?

Also, if one does install some fonts and some undesired font changes appear in browsers, would a System Restore recover the font folder as it was?

p.s. I can't say this enough -- the value of having a backup computer is immense. Really all one needs to do is find a good condition used computer for about $200 and keep a running copy of the same version of Windows. Anytime you have any issues, you've got a fall back computer to compare, as well as use if your primary computer encounters a problem or needs a large block of time for maintenance.