Deleting A Font Owned By TrustedInstaller

A few weeks ago I ran into a problem where I could not delete a font. Originally I tried deleting the font because I was receiving an assertion error about the file t2kstrm.c failing. Supposedly this happens when a corrupt font file is found so I began to delete fonts from my computer that weren’t needed.

I came across some fonts that were quite different from the other fonts inside of my Fonts folder and when I tried to delete them I received the Destination Folder Access Denied error. This confused me as I was trying to delete them and essentially it was telling me that I could not access the Recycle bin. So I headed back online to try to find a solution but couldn’t find anything. After looking more into the security settings for the font files I found that the owner of them was named TrustedInstaller.

TrustedInstaller is supposedly some legacy application or group of owners in older versions of Windows. Due to the fact that the Administrator account wasn’t the group owning the font I could not delete it like you normally would. After some further inspection and trying out different combinations I eventually found a remedy to the solution. So if you have a font owned by the TrustedInstaller group and can’t delete it, follow the below steps and everything should work out.

Note: I am using Windows Vista so these steps may be different depending upon your operating system.

  1. Right click on the font file, click on Properties
  2. Click the Security tab, click on Advanced
  3. Click on the Owner tab, click on Edit
  4. Select the new group that you would like to control the file
  5. Click Apply, if you receive a popup message click OK again
  6. You should be back at the Advanced Security Settings window with the Owner tab selected
  7. Click OK, if you receive a popup message click OK again
  8. You should now be back at the file’s Properties window
  9. Click Edit, select the group that you would like to give full control of the file
  10. Select the Allow checkbox for the Full control option, click Apply
  11. Click OK, you should now be back at the file Properties window, click OK to exit
  12. Delete the file

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