All stock 7.2.  With the freetype rpm installed and anti-aliasing enabled 
for fonts, both kate and kwrited look very, very bad.  Other applications 
don't... I think it is simply that kate and kwrited are unfortunate 
enough to have as there default font something that is supplied by 
freetype, and doesn't anti-alias well.  For the next version of Red Hat 
Linux, can the default font be changed to something else for both these 
KDE apps?  Currently, when the machine is shutdown kwrited (which by 
itself is a good thing) displays a virutally unreadable message which 
serves only to confuse users.  Screenshot attached.

A temporary fix:
Disable anti-aliasing, or (I think) remove the freetype package.