<html> <head> <style> .hmmessage P { margin:0px; padding:0px } body.hmmessage { font-size: 10pt; font-family:Verdana } </style> </head> <body class='hmmessage'> Thanks for all the suggestions. FYI to anyone else who hits this : the solution turned out to be to get the latest version of fontconfig, configure it to be aware of the fonts in my new xorg install dirs as first choice and the old fonts as second choice, i.e. tell fontconfig something like ./configure --with-default-fonts=/mnt/ahbakup/xorg_modular/lib/X11/fonts --with-add-fonts=/usr/share/fonts and then rebuild fontconfig and everything downstream of it (which was quite a lot but I *think* most importantly Xft , cairo, pango, atk and gtk2) and now all fonts working just fine. I don't know that all of what I listed above was necessary, it's possible some packages need not have been rebuilt and would have just picked up the new libs, don't know, but if you are building xorg from source I'd suggest doing the same. Note you must first build the xorg fonts so that fontconfig can see them. I.e. build xorg first and verify server works, then do as above (which does imply you end up building Xft twice, once as part of building xorg and then again after rebuilding fontconfig, but does no harm). If anyone else wants to correct my "method" please do, I am basing it solely on the fact that it worked. And thanks for the suggestion of using jhbuild - I'll try that next time .... John <hr />Tell the whole story with photos, right from your Messenger window. <a href='http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9650732' target='_new'>Learn how!</a></body> </html>