there are whats called "system fonts". these if deleted will cause you not to see anything on your computer programs.
hard to recognize these and most of time like you say they are marked as do not remove or sys. now dont go crazy deleting fonts. with todays hard drives, of 40, 60, 120 GIG, you can load up a pretty good bunch of fonts without worrying like we used to on 386/40 computers with 200 meg hard drives. i have close to 700 fonts on my 98se hard drive and have no problems. little slow opening corel/photoshop/photopaint as it has to do a font search as it opens. i kinda clean out anything that looks like duplicates....these being ARIEL, HUMANIST, BODINI, GOUDY, ETC....you know the fonts that have 3 different names but all of look the same as ARIEL. some people take the time to organize you fonts into SERIFED, SANS SERIFED, SCRIPT, CURSIVE, BLOCK, ITALIC.....this makes a font hunt a lot easier. as for deleting fonts good idea is to look and see the last time you ever used a certain font.....if you aint usin it and it aint a system font trade it for something you will use. windows XP has a bunch of useless fonts in it....wz or something like that....adobe type manager loads some useless ones also. this is also another thing most people dont understand is TRUE TYPE vs ADOBE
TYPE 1 fonts. to use ADOBE fonts on 98..you need ADOBE TYPE MANGAGER . in XP it sees both types with out an add on program. TT FONTS are windows based fonts and where designed to work like the adobe fonts. now in this business FONTS DO MAKE A DIFFERANCE!!!(3exclamation points). TT fonts are vector built. meaning they have an outline and it is moveable with nodes.....LOTS OF NODES!!! now adobe
TYPE 1 fonts where designed same way but much better and the nodes are only where the line transistions direction.
you can see this by pulling up a TT font and an TYPE 1 font side by side and then go to node edit mode on each. now this dont seem like a big differance but YOUR PLOTTER READS FROM NODE TO NODE as it plots........you got 50 nodes....plotter has to read 50 different point and it will "creep" along the node line as it reads it. now same font in TYPE 1 will have 10 nodes.....ZIP,ZIP, ZIP ZIP....from node to node...and youll think your plotter got wings.
again dont worry about havin 3-400 fonts on your computer....if you got a 500MGZ of better it wont slow you down. gettin a 1000 fonts now thats a little much and i dont think 98 will handle that many without some problem. hope this helps.