It was promising, but I shoulda smelled the …

Many pros had "heard" good things about FontExplorer, but I was unable to find any InDesign or Quark pros that risked their workflow to try it out.

Following the anemic recommendations didn't pan out. It didn't move the fonts easily and if I didn't have the foresight to back up the old system fonts on another drive, everything would have been lost.

I tried many of the cache cleanup scenarios which only made things worse. Several obvious bugs popped up, which I reported. Still waiting to hear from Linotype. The most obnoxious was that the Font Book Character Palette came up at every turn and couldn't be disabled. My biggest complaint is that there is no uninstall feature.

Finally, I had to do the dreaded System re-install of Tiger to get things working so I could get back to work and forget the nightmare of lost hours.

It is a promising app, and if it can ever get out of the "Alpha" stage and test well with pros, I might give it another try.

Meanwhile, I'm optimistic that there might be something good to try next week at MacWorld Expo