I then opened the document I had been having problems with, and the fonts were auto-activating again I'm guessing that this file hadn't been purged and refreshed in a while, because the new file it created was much smaller less than 200KB.' 'I restarted, logged in as a normal user, and started up Suitcase and Illustrator as I normally would. Not knowing what exactly was kept inside, but pretty sure it would be rebuilt, I dragged it to the trash, but didn't delete it (just in case). 'I logged out and back in as 'root.' In my search for various caches which might be the culprit, I ran across a file in the System/Library/Caches/ directory which was named ' fontTablesAnnex.' It's size was a suspicious 10.8MB. I finally decided to dive deeper into the system.

I moved on to deleting any instance of an AdobeFnt.lst file, and any user-level font-related cache or database file. I got more desperate as nothing seemed to help. 'I tried the normal tricks making sure the correct options were set in Suitcase and in the Auto-Activation plug-in for Illustrator, replacing my Illustrator preferences with backups I keep, deleting the Suitcase preferences and re-dropping my fonts into Suitcase. MacFixIt reader Steve Summers found a culprit cache file that was causing fonts to not auto-activate through Extensis' Suitcase:

Extensis fonts for malayalam