Why Fonts list will not display in illustrator when selected from tool bar

My fonts are not visible in character panel in Illustrator 5

Try the solution in post 2 here.

Another possibility is that the character option for the control panel has been turned off. Check this by clicking on the fly-out menu at the far right side of the control panel and make sure "character" is checked.

I'm guessing you are saying the control panel at the top of the screen is not displaying the font list when you choose the type tool? You can bypass this by opening the character panel from the Window menu. I don't have CS5 anymore so this screen capture is from CC2018 but it should suffice. Hope this helps as a temporary solution.

Michael