Windows 7 Fonts – Can’t Remove Certain Fonts Fix

fontsprocess-explorerwindows 7

We have an x64 Windows 7 professional machine on which some but not all fonts can not be removed. The problematic fonts in question are not system fonts or Microsoft Office fonts (I think, they haven't updated the list for Office2010). One example: StoneSansOSITC TT (filename IT243__.ttf). Curiously other fonts in the same family could be deleted, about half a dozen.

The error message is something like "this file is in use and can't be deleted [try again] [skip]".

We've tried removing the fonts under a domain account which is member of the local Administrators group as well as the Local Administrator account. We've tried removing from Safe Mode and various combinations of logging off and rebooting.

I used Process Explorer to search for the open file handle, and it identifies csrss.exe as having that file open, as well as a number of other fonts. I've proved, as the wikipedia article on csrss says, that terminating the process results in a blue screen of death.

How do I track down which application/service/process is causing these files to be in use all the time and shut them down?

update:

This person's similar report indicates there may be a problem with Windows 7 getting confused over how many typefaces are represented in a font family (thinks there are 4 when actually are 6).

This thread has a pic of the error message we see:
font cannot be deleted because it is in use error dialog

We tried the Unlocker program mentioned here, and while it identified locked files in the fonts directory they didn't match the ones we were attempting to delete.

Best Answer

I've just managed to solve this. I uninstalled the problem font via a font management program called NexusFont but I think it will probably work with other programs with a similar functionality.

Related Solutions

Windows – Help transferring Mac OS X fonts to Windows

For some Mac fonts, the font information is stored entirely in the resource fork of the file. On Mac OS X, such fonts look like normal files in Finder, but from tools like ls (and anything else that uses the POSIX layer) these look like zero byte files.

The __MACOSX/._* files from the Zip file are AppleDouble encoded versions of the combination of the resource fork and some extra Finder information from the original files. AppleDouble files are used by Mac OS X when storing files that have a resource fork or Finder info on filesystems that do not support resource forks and Finder info (here Zip is considered a filesystem).

I am not a Windows user and my searches did not turn on any pre-made tools for this. I did find a set of tools that might work. It would be best to run them on a Mac, but they might work on Windows, too.

If you have access to a Mac

extract your Zip archive on that Mac (double-click it, do not use the command-line unzip) and
use a tool like Fondu to extract the TTF (or whatever) from the resource fork
- (I just found the fondu, I have never used it before; caveat emptor)

If you do not have access to a Mac, you may still be able to use fondu, but you will need to compile fondu yourself (it looks like it is possible to build it on Linux, so you might also be able to build it in (e.g.) Cygwin). The next problem is that fondu does not seem able to read AppleDouble files, so you will have to find something that can extract the bare resource fork from the AppleDouble encoded ._*file. I am not sure which Windows-specific tools might be able to decode AppleDouble, but the Mac::AppleSingleDouble Perl module can do it:

perl -MMac::AppleSingleDouble -e 'for(@ARGV) {
    $a = new Mac::AppleSingleDouble($_);
    if(open $f, ">", $_.".rsrc") {
        binmode $f;
        print $f $a->get_entry(2);
        close $f;
    }
}'__MACOSX/._Webdings
# now I have a __MACOSX/._Webdings.rsrc file from which fondu can extract Webdings.ttf

If you are familiar with building Unix-oid tools, building fondu should be easy. For the Perl bit, you should be able to use the cpan tool that comes with most installations of Perl (or, if you are familiar with the layout and installation of Perl modules, just download the AppleSingleDouble.pm file and put it in an appropriate place).

Firefox – Replace fonts in firefox on only certain websites, and only certain fonts

Depending on the number of pages, Stylish may be an option. You make a simple css file, where you re-define the fonts.

Afterwards you select urls the style should be applied to.

No great css knowledge is necessary, you can stick with font-family: whatever;.

Related Question