Flash Font Problems

I'm using Flash CS4 and have wasted--over the course of the past 18 months--at least three days of work time trying, in vain, to make Flash fonts work completely consistently.
Problems: 1) Fonts don't appear after FontAgent activation (must copy to Adobe/Fonts folder), 2) Bits of styled type totally disappear on compile (haven't figured this one out and try to avoid certain faces), 3) and most recently, totally bizarre font display (looks like egg thrown against the wall), which, despite verifying the fonts, replacing them (even though they checked out fine), cleaning the font caches (with Font Finagler, nee Font Cache Cleaner), doing a million restarts and praying, are still screwed up.
One possible common thread is that these seems to be OpenType fonts. But the errors are totally inconsistent -- for example, the font with #3 above had worked fine for nearly a year before becoming hopelessly destroyed in the past five hours, and only *some* characters in #2 disappear.
I'm posting here mostly out of frustration, since previous posts on similar issues haven't yielded decent (working) solutions and Googling these problems (ad nauseam) mostly shows people using either different font managers (or none at all) or working with dynamic text. (Mine is static text.)
But perhaps someone has a definitive resource/recipe for troubleshooting and solving these font problems?
Or perhaps someone could shed some light on why Adobe uses separate font folders and caches?

OK, well! It seems that I'm **not** crazy. I just read in TidBITS today that what I saw last week was related to a bug in Mac OS X 10.6.7, which apparently fixed some font security problems, but broke something having to do with OpenType fonts. I guess I made the mistake of being on the bleeding edge.
http://db.tidbits.com/article/12078
I stick by my general complaint, however. Adobe or some good member of the community should create a definitive resource for understanding and solving font problems in Flash. I've spent a lot of time looking for answers to my questions in Adobe help docs, in questions posted on these forums, and Googling for solutions -- and have seen many, many others expressing my same frustration of wasted time and so-so answers. Since fonts are critical to pretty much every Flash project, this should be information that is **easy** to find.

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