This morning I was packing my stuff for my relocation to Kolkata, and to make my last day in Bangalore a bit exciting… my machine vomited an issue. Probably, it thought my last day should be memorable. And boy, memorable it was!

The good thing is that, my laptop is finally in a good shape. Bad thing is, I don't know why it happened!

Without further ado, let me tell you the symptom. Most of my applications were working as expected, except PowerShell ISE, and SharePoint ULS Log viewer. The moment I started any one of this, it crashed. Simply crashed with an error! I was wondering about how and why, since it was working till yesterday.

The error was, the type initializer for 'System.Windows.Media.FontFamily' threw an exception.

Checked the Event Log to find… [trimming the noise]

Log Name:      Application
Source:        Windows Error Reporting
Event ID:      1001
Level:         Information
Description:
Fault bucket , type 0
Event Name: CLR20r3
Response: Not available
Cab Id: 0

Problem signature:
P1: sharepointlogviewer.exe
P2: 2.6.1.0
P3: 4c04905b
P4: PresentationCore
P5: 3.0.0.0
P6: 4ca2ec63
P7: 501f
P8: 0
P9: System.TypeInitialization
P10:

Attached files:

These files may be available here:
C:\Users\MYNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\
Windows\WER\ReportQueue\AppCrash_sharepointlogvie_2b983e84b45c8d7d85993a3fbb4232243d03a25_230749fd

Searched for the error string and found a bunch of links, but none helped. Finally, got back to the debugger and thought that I should have done it quite earlier. Anyways, the debugger didn't really helped as much either. The only think I was sure of was that somehow, my PresentationCore is crying about the Fonts folder. I decided to fix the fonts folder based on the errors I found. It is harder than I thought.

I lot of links talk about setting Fonts to "Restore default font settings". In my case, it didn't help much.

I made up my mind to take some risk. REMEMBER, Your Mileage May Vary!!!! Don't blame me if anything goes wrong with your machine. If you aren't comfortable with Registry, probably you shouldn't even try what I am going to say.

Here is what I did. I asked one of my colleagues to zip his Fonts folder from Windows 7. I also asked for the following registry key to be exported. HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts.

Once I got the Fonts and exported registry key, I simply deleted my Fonts key from the registry. After that, I selected all the fonts and deleted it [quite a lot couldn't be deleted, but I simply skipped the ones that couldn't be deleted]. After I replaced my Fonts folder and double clicked on the REG file that I got from my friend, I rebooted my machine.

Thankfully, the issue got fixed… and I am able to write this post. I hope it helps someone!

Until next time,
Rahul