Warning: Bogus Helvetica Font May Appear in System/Library/Fonts

I received an unreadable email message from a Windows-using friend recently. The text was a jumble of fractions. Things got weirder later that day when I noticed the same font corruption on Amazon.com and a few other sites that evidently use Helvetica. Restarting my computer cleared up the problem, but it recurred. Eventually I discovered a pair of bogus "HelveticaMM" fonts in System/Library/Fonts, which obviously did not belong there. Not only are these fonts not part of OS X's complement of System fonts; in fact, they don't even exist. There has never been a Multiple Master (MM) version of Helvetica. Logging in as Root and tossing these bogus fonts has solved the problem (hopefully for good), but the question remains: How did these fonts get into my System Fonts folder in the first place? It certainly appears that my friend's garbled email message was involved in the corruption of my System fonts, but is this possible? If so, it would be (for me, at least) my first-ever experience in more than 20 years of using Macs with System corruption caused by an outside agent.
Has anyone seen anything like this before? If so, what's your take on the cause? More to the point: How could one prevent something like this from happening again?
Thanks!
20-inch iMac 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Meanwhile, at least I've nuked the offending fonts.
There is nothing "offending" or illegitimate about these fonts. They are installed by OS X 10.4, not by "some application installer." They do not cause the problem of seeing fractions instead of Latin, which has been experienced and solved by hundreds of people before you. That results from a different font, Helvetica Fractions, which is not installed by OS X or by any Apple application.
Your information on OS X and MM fonts is at least 2 years out-of-date. Please read the link you were provided earlier, which is from April 2005:
http://images.apple.com/macosx/pdf/MacOSXFontTB.pdf
From page 9:
"Support for industry standards
Mac OS X delivers industry-leading support for popular font formats.
• Multiple Master. This special type of PostScript font allows variation of one or more font parameters (such as weight) to create a large number of custom styles, also known as instances. Mac OS X can activate already created instances of Multiple Master fonts."

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