The half baked public beta of Safari 3 bought enough bad PR for Apple and so they have silently released a new version - Safari 3.0.1.

The new patch fixes certain security issues but the font display problems persist on lot of computers. Here's a screenshot of the latest version of Safari (notice the random fonts in the menu bar, bookmarks and the About dialog)

You'll have to redo the entire exercise of editing the fonts.plist file in order to see the menu bars and websites like Yahoo or Amazon correctly.  The other option is to manually copy the Lucida Grande fonts from your c:\windows\fonts folder to the C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources folder. It has worked for lot of Safari users.

If you don't see the toolbar or status bar in Safari 3, copy the Defaults.plist from C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources\ to C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari and rename it to Preferences.plist - this will reset everything to factory defaults.

This overnight release looks more in response to the 0day exploit discovered just two hours after the public release. Should wait for another patch from Apple.