No joy there, so I chalked it up to either sunspot activity or voodoo.

When that turned up nothing, I tried a reinstall of Office. Having recently dealt with a case involving a corrupt copy of Helvetica, I checked the machine for rogue or corrupt font files in the %WinDir%\Fonts directory. Initially only a single user reported the problem.

(This is a technical article, so try to keep up.) It seemed like Word was having a really hard time enumerating all the fonts on the system and creating the previews that are shown in the dropdown.

Whenever they tried to open the font drop-down to pick a new font, there was a frustrating delay of about 5-10 seconds between clicking on the drop-down and the drop-down opening, during which time Word would not respond to any user input.ĭuring this time, the drop-down itself would either be invisible apart from the Aero shadow effect, or appear as a filled black rectangle: A couple of staff recently reported that they were experiencing an odd problem in Microsoft Word 2010.