serious WinXP Home font problem

Somehow, all the fonts have been erased from my friends C:\windows\fonts folder, so all the text in WinXP is just squares, empty little boxes. I was able to copy the fonts from a healthy PC to his using my thumb drive, and then setting a new display theme fixed it. Then we rebooted and again all the fonts have been erased :banghead About 1-2 minutes after the desktop loads up, we get an error message "MBlit MFC Application has encountered a problem and needs to close.....". Luckily, we can read this, which is a freakin miracle because all other text is nonexistant. In the error details it mentions the files mblit.exe, ntdll.dll, kernel32.dll, USER32.DLL, GDI32.dll, and of course a bunch more. I haven't had a chance to go to the knowledge base yet... any ideas or help will be greatly appreciated!
Thanx!

 

This is a registry problem.

Those files arent actually missing.

Verify you have this key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts

If not, create it.

Reboot, then go into Control Panel and re-add your fonts from the C:\windows\fonts folder.

Or you can simply do a system restore.

 

How can I verify the key when I can't read anything? There's NO text anywhere, just empty boxes, so navigating the registry is basically impossible. I'll probably write a .REG file that I could run from a floppy to install the registry key because there's no text. What values would I enter for the registry key? DWORD? etc.... If you could post the 'script' I could paste into Notepad for the .REG file, I'd really appreciate it.
We can't do a system restore because he turned off the system restore feature a long time ago so we have no restore points

EDIT- I suppose I could re-copy the fonts from my thumb drive which gives me text temporarily, then check the registry. But I'd still need the values for the key....

 

Here, its from Vista but pretty much universal--you probably dont have the same fonts as me, but the core is there.

 

Thanx alot! Problem solved. I couldn't have done it without knowing which reg key to replace.
Thanx again...

(now I'm having an IE problem, but that's for another thread )