It's good to know that you've managed to get something sorted.
Thanks for telling us as it helps when other people have the same problem.
It's a shame that you had to start from scratch but that's sometimes the best solution.
P.S. I think Scribus defaults to Arial as it's one of the "web-safe fonts" that most people expect to be installed everywhere.
Yes, I am grateful not only to have found a solution but to be able to help others...it's one of those things about computing that I visualize as having toilet paper stuck to the shoe.
It is curious though, that, upon launching, Scribus wouldn't have "sniffed out" that Arial was not present, and simply let go of it, so Arial must be more important to Scribus than just some font you can pick.
I remember having an experience paring down fonts in Mac OS..fonts I never used and would never dream of using, even as the system font - how folders and menus would appear in Mac OS.
Well, suddenly my browser flipped out and instead of human-readable characters, web pages would load looking like they'd been written in Klingon. The browser was looking for - and unable to find - the fonts it needed to correctly render web pages, even though the font *I* had stipulated was not the missing one. I think it was one of those under-the-hood requirements of the browsers..
The fix was neither easy nor risk-free and IIRC, I ended up doing a re-install.
Yikes!