After upgrading from 7.1 to 7.2, the sawfish appearance configuration applet locks up before initializing. stracing /usr/bin/sawfish-capplet-appearance shows the sawfish-ui process crashing with an internal error, causing the parent applet process to get stuck in an infinite loop.
Created attachment 32438 [details] strace of child sawfish-ui process.
Created attachment 32439 [details] after sawfish-ui aborts, the parent process goes into an infinite loop.
Backing out patch2 from sawfish src rpm eliminates this crash. The bad font name is the original problem, and the problem itself manifests itself with sawfish not being able to recover gracefully from sawfish-ui crashing.
More bad font repercussions (Set your locale to en_US, should fix this.) *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 54491 ***