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Helvetica is a Postscript font, and it used to be given as part of some applications like Adobe Type Manager (ATM) that was distributed with FrameMaker in earlier versions. Unfortunately that's not the case with newer versions of ATM or FM (ATM Lite doesn't have fonts any more), but that may be where the font on your system came from originally.

Helvetica also came as part of Acrobat, and again the full version of Acrobat used to come with earlier versions of FM. Also, some Postscript printers have Helvetica as a "printer-resident" font, so if you had a different PS printer on your old system, the font may have been available that way. There are lots of other ways you could have gotten it previously, with other apps, etc.

Do you have access to your old system still? If so, search your drives for files called "hv_*.p*" which is the file naming convention for Helvetica. That way you'll know whether you had the actual font files on your old system, or whether it was using printer-resident Helvetica.

Those websites have much more detailed info on "where fonts come from" and how to troubleshoot than what's possible to reproduce here, as the whole font question has many aspects. If you follow some of their suggestions and you're still unable to resolve it, please post more information on what you've tried so far. Or post what did work for you -- we always appreciate knowing what worked, so that other folks in the same situation can benefit from the forum thread.