Removing foreign language fonts

I have to add my voice here, hoping Microsoft listens. I too am someone who has worked with MS products for a long time (since MS-DOS 2.0) and I have never seen such a bonehead UI choice. This megalist of fonts costs me seconds to minutes *every time* I make a font choice. It's an abomination. I'm not willing to resort to the font moves suggested here, not least because I expect the next Service Pack either to barf when it sees missing fonts, or else reinstall them. Instead, I've had to resort to making a separate list of actually useful fonts. This is ridiculous. I haven't had to do something like this since about 1990. Microsoft, listen to your users here. This is absurd. Give us control over our fonts. -= Skip =-

Here is a great workaround solution to the problem that doesn't involve tedious ownership transferring:

Go to the Fonts directory

On the left panel select "Font Settings"

Check "Allow Fonts to be installed using a shortcut (advanced)

Copy all of the system fonts that you don't want into a different directory

Select all of the moved fonts and right click

Select "Install Font as Shortcut"

Now go back to the Fonts directory

Delete all of the unnecessary fonts which are now deletable because they are shortcuts!

Voila!

Peter (and to those of MSFT who have responded) - thank you for your thoughtful and detailed replies. Obviously there is and will continue to be a vast difference of opinion between our viewpoints as users and what has evidently been the house view, as it were; folks like myself see this as a misdirected example of MS's attempts to please everybody and in this case appears to have placated very few. Google this topic. Those of us posting here aren't by any means the only folks a bit miffed by IskoolaPoota or Kokila :)

It appears then, in summary:

Microsoft stuffed a bunch of fonts that will be of use to a narrow range of users in the United States into Windows 7 and then proceeded to lock many of them under the heading of "needed for the operation of the OS so don't touch these". Some foreign fonts have been protected that should not have been. Only one of those has been named in this thread specifically (Aparajita) though there may be others. Some foreign fonts CAN be deleted - but as yet, it appears that the best way to do so is trial and error (Whoops. This one won't let me delete it. Must be one of those "system" fonts) as there is still no list stating specifics as to which really, truly ARE system fonts and which ones can be stripped by the safe mode/ownership procedures and which are incorrectly tagged and which ones, when removed, really will hose your system (hope you've got that restore DVD handy).

Seriously: were there THAT MANY user requests for this language interoptability during beta testing? For Chinese, Urdu, Cambodian, Khmer and other nationality Asian/Arabic types to be embedded into the OS? Windows XP had it right - foreign fonts shipped with it and keyboard mapping was available but deletion was always a given.

The point has been made that other programs may dump more fonts into Windows than what has been shipped currently in this new OS. Very true. And yep, you betcha I can/will delete those too if some of them prove unsuitable for my purposes :)

As it is evident that there will be no resolution on this topic until possibly Windows 7 SP1 (if then), and as I have the Home Premium Family Pack with only one system currently updated, I will use up the second license on my laptop and then proceed to go font by font to see which one's removal will turn it into toast. This should be interesting :)

- You need to take ownership - Set permissions to full control for your username - Boot to safemode command promptFrom here you will not receive the access denied error message.

Okay, so Win7 thinks these are system fonts and makes you jump through an amazingly ANNOYING series of hoops to get rid of them. I want to be rid of these fonts also. But this brings up a different question:

Which fonts, then, are TRULY important to Win7? I know the major ones - Arial, Times, Courier, Symbol, Wingdings, etc. - are there any others that seriously would screw up the install? To put it another way - which of the fonts can be safely removed WITHOUT hosing the OS?