HELP!! Office Problem!!

[quackattack]

Hey guys,

I need alot of help. I convinced my sister to get an iBook a few months ago. I told her that mac is way easier than PC. Now it appears that her computer is freaking out. She is calling me for tech support and I don't know how to help her. She is having very strange problems. So I will have a series of threads to help me with these problems, I would greatly appreciate any input.

First problem: She was having trouble with video (I will get into this later) and I told her to repair permissions, prebind, etc. To do this I had her get Cocktail, I figured it would be the easiest way.

Now, after she ran it, she cannot open Microsoft Office or iPhoto. Office is the most pressing problem because she is a student. When she opens it she gets an error message telling her she has corrupt fonts (see attached pic). She then has to force quit, nothing will work. I would suggest a reinstall but she left the CD at home (the parents are mailing it up, so this will be an option later). I have ran out of ideas, but hate to leave my sister stranded! ANY IDEAS ON HOW TO FIX THIS?? Thank you all so much.

-quack

 

[CanadaRAM]

The Corrupt Font message could be because there's ...er... a corrupt font?

Given that the font name appears to be a double-byte format, chances are that it is one of the OSX Asian fonts. Assuming this is an English operating system and you don't need extended language support>

Walk her through this on the 'phone. You can go into the Library:Fonts and the System:Library:Fonts and safely remove any font with a name that is in non-Roman type, and those with names like Geeza, Li, Hai and similar. Toss 'em into another folder or outright trash them. Then restart and try again.

Cocktail might not be the right tool to put in the hands of a 2 month new Mac user. A support problem is, you don't have any idea what she did to the machine with Cocktail.
Also stress to Sis that she should not move or rename any unfamiliar sounding folders or files - she could do damage to the OS.

If she continues to have problems, Archive and Install with OSX would not be bad, followed by reinstall of Office and the Apple and Microsoft updates.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

 

[quackattack]

The Corrupt Font message could be because there's ...er... a corrupt font?

Given that the font name appears to be a double-byte format, chances are that it is one of the OSX Asian fonts. Assuming this is an English operating system and you don't need extended language support>

Thanks for the reply. I had already figured it was a corrupt font (sarcasm appreciated however). I tried having her move some of the Microsoft fonts (in the way you describe) to no avail, but it never occured to me that this could be a non-localized font. Would it be better to simply run a de-localization program and save her some HD space while I'm at it? Or would that be giving her too many weapons to screw up her computer? I realize giving her Cocktail may not be have been wise, but I stressed that she should not fool around with it. She is fairly cautious, so I am not too worried. Also, could this be the problem with iPhoto, or was that unrelated? Thanks again and I look forward to any replies.

-quack