Accidentally deleting font causes Evernote to get into an infinite loop

[kkathman 5]

Just as a heads up, and perhaps this information is buried here on this site, but don't EVER delete fonts from your system. This can quite possibly cause very serious issues with both Evernote and your computer!

 

My experience:

 

I run Evernote in an Apple microcosm, so it's on my laptop, my desktop, my iPhone and iPad.  I was noticing on my desktop that my system was taking an inordinate period of time to load a couple of programs, and through research, the suggest was to remove unused fonts. Using Apple's Font Book, I was able to pick and choose those fonts I wanted removed. One of those was the Lucida Grande, menlo font. Bad idea!

 

The next time I tried to use Evernote, the program initially warned that the font wasn't available, but STILL allow me to go into the program. It shouldn't do this. But it allowed continuing, and the program crashed. What ensued was a vicious cycle, over and over again. Evernote didn't terminate, but instead reloaded and relaunched. With the same prompts and the same crash. Over and over. Even going to the System monitor and killing both Evernote and Evernote helper didn't help, because within only a few moments, they both re-spawned as active process and began the loop all over again.  Rebooting the computer was nearly impossible, because Evernote stopped the restart and reboot cycle. It took me about 10 times to kill the two processes through the terminal to allow the system to reboot, and even then, the processes would respawn.

 

I attempted to restore my fonts from Time Machine, but apparently the font doesn't reside in the two standard locations (App Library or System Library).  I reinstalled OSX and that didn't fix it either.

Eventually I had to reboot from a hard shutdown, uninstall Evernote completely (there are LOTS of files), then re-install.   That finally worked, as apparently, Evernote itself is responsible for that font!

 

Two things came out of this:  

 

1) DON'T EVER delete that font from your computer

2) Evernote needs to give a message that the font is missing and then suggest re-installing the app, before shutting down with a crash. Otherwise the user will be caught in an infinite loop.

[Frank.dg 1,385]

Thanks for the magnanimous effort in laying this out for other users. Much appreciated!