Hey All
Read this post from a different thread and then my post #11 above:
"A little update on my specific problem which has been resolved, in the course of which I discovered some strange stuff that remains unresolved. It seems like when InDesign generates its font list and the Find Font dialogue box, it gets its information on what fonts are available from PostScript files, not necessarily the fonts themselves. To make a long story short, THIS was the cause of my problem.
Here's where we stood: All InDesign documents my coworker and I attempted to open that contained Arial fonts (regular, italic, bold, bold italic) came up with an error message that these fonts were missing. They were not, the font files were right where they always had been and were even packaged with each document. Some documents were originally created by myself by copying/pasting PageMaker text and graphics, others were just brand new documents with brand new text and graphics.
Come to find out, we had a corrupted Helvetica.ttf font on both our computers that somehow got itself associated with outdated Arial PostScript info. These Arial PostScript imposters were being displayed under Arial in InDesign both in the font list and in Find Font. The only way to see that they were being generated NOT by the Arial.ttf file(s), but in actuality the Helvetic.ttf file, was in the path information in Find Font.
I did some testing once I discovered the discrepancy, making new files with these Arial imposters. Sure enough, no font problems for myself or my coworker. Then I packaged the test files, trying to recreate the same situation as the original documents that, once out of my computer, returned font errors. This time, instead of packaging the Arial.ttf files and then choking for one or both of us, InDesign bundled the Helvetic.ttf file and everything still worked OK on both computers. Very odd.
In any event, we gave the corrupted Helvetic.ttf file the boot and installed a brand new version, crossing our fingers because before when we had attempted to replace the old Arial PostScript files with the newer/real ones (something that we couldnt do consistently, for unknown reasons) replacing the fonts caused massive problems with a lot of text in a lot of tables. This time there was no rocky transition. Once Helvetic.ttf was gone, InDesign loaded up the correct Arial PostScript files and gave us no error messages about fonts being missing. This is interesting, given that we had deleted the font that originally created all the instances of Arial in these documents, but not so interesting if InDesign is seeking out PostScript data, not actual font file names, when it decides what fonts are available for use.
I still do no know how the Helvetica file could have been corrupted to return this particular result or why the problem was able to jump from one computer to another when no files were exchanged at any time this was the real horror, files that no one but myself had ever touched and were nowhere else but my computer were suddenly reporting missing fonts.
Kudos must go to two programs, Font Xplorer, which tipped me off to multiple versions of font PostScript files hanging around, and Font Doctor, which identified the Helvetica font as corrupted. InDesign was a help in that it was the only program which displayed both the PostScript file info and the font file path (otherwise Id never have known Helvetic.ttf was generating the Arial PostScripts), but if it wasnt so picky, none of these problems would likely have surfaced in the first place, soo
.. "
I didn't have Helvetica installed and since I deleted about 200 font files I don't know which one(s) were corrupted, but the result was the same. You can delete the Adobefnt*.lst files and reboot all you want but until you get rid of the corrupted fonts, it won't help.