Fonts In Fontbook Don't Stay Disabled Upon Restart.

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Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.1 / Dual G5 2Ghz / 1.5 GB RAM

Sometime ago I've had some font-related problems with tiger, and I decided to let Font Finagler clean out the Font Caches.

Upon executing FF, it gave me a warning box which said that all the disabled fonts in FontBook would be enabled back when the caches where cleared. I later found out that's because Tiger now keeps the state of the Fonts (on or off) in these Cachefiles: computer/library/caches/apple.com.ATS/501/ with 501 being UID. The apple.com.ATS folder contains three folders on my computer: one for each user (501/502) and a "system".

And indeed; after restart: all my fonts where enabled. I use only very few of them so I disabled all the fonts that I don't need.

However after the next restart (and every restart & login thereafter) I noticed all the fonts where enabled again!

I started looking for a solution and at macfixit some-one had the same problem (though FF was not involved). He got rid of the problem by trashing the userpref "apple.com.ATS.plist". I've found the same pref on my machine and trashed it, but that didn't help. Re-trashing the cache-files (the whole apple.com.ATS folder) neither. I also deleted the apple.com.fontbook.plist without any visible changes.

I've kept an eye on the fontcache files in the aformentioned folder and noticed most of them where 'edited' at logintime.
* qdfams.db
* fonts.db
* filetoken.db
* annex.db
* annex_aux

only two stayed untouched:
* system_fcache
* local.fcache

Then I created a new user (UID 502), on the same machine, and that user didn't had this problem. I also noticed that only the cache-file "fonts.db" was touched at logintime for this user (computer/library/caches/apple.com.ATS/502). I tried trashing this folder too, and here too, all the fonts for this user where enabled again with next login. I switched some fonts off and logged out, but the state of this user's fonts remained after a new login.

What's going here? I have a feeling that Tiger recreates the fontcache-files everytime I login with the first user. Should I wait for 10.4.2 or is there a simple solution to this (since it seems user-related)?

thnx in advance!



 
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