Digital Home Thoughts: The Night I Crashed Windows 7 Nine Times in a Row

On the whole, I'm really enjoying Windows 7 - I've migrated eight of my computers over to Microsoft's latest operating system, and it's working great on all of them. As you can tell from the above screen shot, however, I hit a snag with one of the systems. You'll never believe what caused the problem though: a font. I'd installed Windows 7 on a brand new Intel Core i7-based media machine (yes, an article is forthcoming) and it was running smoothly. I had a bunch of fonts I wanted to install, so I grabbed them all and dragged them into the font folder. They were installing, when all of a sudden bam, my system blue-screened (BSOD). I was shocked, and initially thought it was a problem with my aggressive overclock (I pushed the Core i7 920 CPU from 2.66 Ghz up to 4.2 Ghz) even though I'd torture tested the system for days without a problem. I clocked my system back to normal, and tried to install the fonts again - and bam, it crashed again!

Now I was really curious because it seemed like a font was taking down the whole operating system. A font? I've never encountered such a thing. There's only one way to troubleshoot a problem like this: out of the 400 or so font files I was trying to install, I grabbed 50 of them, and tried to install them, deleting each group of 50 as I went. When I got to the group of 50 that caused the crash, I narrowed the groups into smaller and smaller pieces: 25, 10, 5...all the while triggering BSODs. By the end of this process, I had crashed Windows 7 nine times:

And the font that caused all this trouble in the end? A ridiculous wingding-style font called AmphibiPrint AOE - it's a font full of frogs, lizards, etc. I certainly didn't need to have that font installed - and was surprised it was even in my group of fonts to install. How can a single font take down a whole operating system? I have no idea. But if you happen to be installing fonts and your Windows 7 computer crashes, now you know why...