The most common cause for this is having too many fonts installed on your system. The page in that link discusses MS Word, but it also applies to Access (and, I believe, Excel).
To trim your fonts you need to:
- Go to the Fonts folder (
C:\Windows\Fontsin WinXP and Win7, not sure about other OS's) - Copy the fonts you don't think you'll need
- Paste them into
C:\Windows\FontsArchiveor some other similarly named folder - Delete the fonts you copied out of the Fonts folder (there's no way to do a simple move, so you have to do the whole Copy--Paste--Delete dance)
- Go to Access and see if your font list is back
When I had to do this, I did not need to restart MS Access in order for the font list to come back...I just had to get rid of enough fonts. Unfortunately, there's no magic number of fonts to get rid of; the exact number depends on the length of the fonts' filenames (it's something to do with how the fonts are stored in the registry).
One last note. The KB article I linked above mentions only Word. In my case, all the fonts were showing correctly in Word and Excel. It was just the Access font list that was empty.
For anecdotal purposes, I can tell you that this became a problem for me after I installed a copy of ESRI GIS mapping software. The ESRI software installed 73(!) true-type fonts on my system (most of these were symbol fonts).