I return to edit my own post, because the solution for me anyways seems to be that posted in this forum above from Bryan Kaplan in 2014, which indicates the problem to be related to a setting in ADI, specifically, Hydravision, Desktop Manager, and disabling the "Enable Dialog Repositioning." Doing this made everything return to normal. See arcgis 10.0 - Why are Character Marker Symbol Dialog not showing up in the Symbol Property Editor di...
This problem seems to have been persisting for nearly 6 years.
Does anyone have a consistent solution, or better yet any idea of what causes it.
I get many of the same issues mentioned here. Duplicate characters, won't fix with turning off Maplex.
Essentially, when in Symbol Property Editor, and after selecting dropdown for "Character Marker Symbol", it fails to access the character markers, which includes all the fonts.
It seems that whatever internal mapping occurs, is not targeting my fonts folder.
As far as my existing symbols that I saved when it worked, they do fine, unless I try to edit them, in which case all I get when I try to edit the character markers is the same thing I get as if I were editing the "Simple Marker Symbol." - see below.
Any help on this would be magnificent.