Well, I don't quite know what happened there with the fonts, however my fonts are now back working by deleting the contents of the fonts folder c:\windows\fonts\ and simply copying in verdana.ttf + bold+italics etc into this folder.
The reason I had to copy verdana was because the application 'anno domini' copies a font called broadway into \windows\fonts\ then another application 'Virtual Mechanics Webengine' then uses the broadway font for it's license dialogue box, presumably because that's the only font present in c:\windows\fonts\ unless verdana is in /windows/font/ directory then it uses that which looks an awful lot more legible than the broadway font.
So it seems to be working now, however I have a question.
When you run notepad.exe and look at the fonts available, with an empty windows\fonts\ directory notepad lists about 51 fonts, all of which are truetype except 1. So why are these fonts not in \windows\fonts\ where applications such as webengine can find them ?
And how does fontforge figure in this equation, I assume it generates the 51 fonts & then wine passes those fonts in some way. However won't that cause a problem for applications that expect to find fonts present in \windows\fonts ?
Regards Nick