Too many fonts in Windows 10 can cause slow application starts

Too Many Fonts in Windows 10 Can Cause Slow Application Starts

I have struggled, literally for years, with Quicken being dog slow to start. It could take 30+ seconds to start. From what I could remember, this problem has existed since I first installed Windows 10.

There were some other other small applications that were also doggedly slow to start. Further, changing font properties of a task in outlook was very slow too. It could take 10+ seconds for the font-properties window to fully populate. THAT should have been my clue as to the problem, but sadly I didn’t yet put 2+2 together.

To compound the problem, once quicken and the other apps were started the first time, they would restart fast for quite some time. You had to walk away from the computer for several hours before the problem would appear again.

I just accepted that Win10 was a pile of crap which, based on past versions of Windows, was a reasonable explanation. Another irritating Windows problem I just had to live with it.

Several years later, I had to make an extended road trip so I loaded my Win10 laptop up with Quicken, Outlook, and the various apps I have to use daily. Lo and behold Quicken started fast EVERY time, every day. OK, I realized the problem wasn’t just Win10 but something about that PC as well.

Two years ago, Aug 2021, I sat down and tried to figure out exactly what the issue was. Looking at my notes from those days, I tried re-installing quicken, experimenting with DNS servers, capturing network packets, monitoring it with process hacker, playing with virus scanner settings. Nothing helped.

I went so far as to use procmon to carefully monitor all of the events generated by quicken. Procmon said quicken would spend 30 seconds opening every font I had. And I have a lot. It made no sense that quicken was messing with fonts at startup and the only thing I could see to do was not virus scan those files as they were read, but that made no difference.

At this point, I thought I might try to uninstall some of the many fonts in c:\windows\fonts only to find they all seemed to be ‘system’ fonts and I couldn’t uninstall them. That was 2 years ago, and I don’t recall exactly why I gave up on the font idea except I do recall finding it ridiculous the size and count of all of the required ‘system’ fonts.

Nevertheless, I was out of ideas and my final ‘solution’ was to put quicken into task scheduler so it would start first thing in the morning so when I sat down to use it, it would be ready to go.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I was playing with Office Libre fonts and one of MY fonts was not in c:\windows\fonts. Perplexing because I know I was using it. I found it in C:\Users\dan\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Fonts.

AHA! That’s new. A quick check of an old Win7 system I have and sure enough there is no such directory in Win7. Evidently all user fonts for Win10 get installed into that new directory. Ugh!!

Sure enough I have almost 900 files in that directory. Way back when, I used to do a lot of design work which required a lot of fonts. Those days are long gone, but when I install a new PC, I just copy all of my fonts over because I really don’t know which ones I may want in the future.

My first plan was to copy that fonts folder and then delete most of the user fonts to see if performance would be affected. Well, that failed immediately. Even though they are supposedly personal fonts, like the system fonts, I couldn’t delete most of the ones that I tried.

Rather than screw around with Windows restrictions any longer, I booted the system under Linux using a thumb drive. In Linux it was simple to rename the user fonts directory to fonts-old.

I then rebooted the PC under windows. Removing the fonts directory had no severe side effect. For the past 2 weeks, I have been monitoring performance and quicken is very fast. On an unloaded system it will start in about 5 seconds. That is what I would expect. Small apps I had problems with have all started equally fast. And changing fonts in outlook is fast again.

When I stumble onto a font I need (I have learned to make do almost entirely with Georgia and Helvetica now) I just “install” it by copying it from fonts-old into the normal fonts folder. The PC asks if I want to replace existing fonts and after I say yes, the fonts show up in the user font directory.

I don’t understand why Quicken and a handful of apps needs to scan every installed font on the system. I suspect those programmers are just calling some black-box windows function and that is really where the problem lies. It seems like the ONLY time all fonts should be scanned is when I bring up a font dialog box (like the issue in outlook). But I no longer need 900 font files, so this solution works for me!