After much confusion and a little web searching I discovered that the reason we had so many font problems was AbiWord. rpm --erase fixed it. AbiWord: 1> Installs fonts with false names on the global font path. AbiWord adds an Arial, for example, that's really Nimbus Sans. http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2598 2> Messes with the font path while running (meaning, if Abi is running, other apps behave differently). AbiWord's foundary name comes before "adobe" "monotype" or "urw", so when AbiWord is running you get AbiWord's fonts or a weird mixture of fonts: http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1030 3> AbiWord includes copyrighted fonts with no licence or notice: http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2598 4> Will not use valid system fonts: http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2422 http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1381 http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2493 5> The bugzilla comments from the core developers read like: "I do not consider this a bug.", and "Then please get someone @ Ximian to help us out. I'm sorry, but we've got to prioritize our bugs and this is nowhere near the top of our list." The AbiWord developers have shown no real interest in fixing the above, not even for their 1.0 release, and they defend the current design. Until AbiWord ceases to be in the font business, it's a danger to the rest of the distribution. Please move abiword to a location on the CD's where it won't be installed (even on an "everything" install). If just a few applications took the liberties that AbiWord does, absolute chaos would result.
We no longer leave the abiword font "aliases" in place which resolves most of the problems related to that and their foundry name has changed so that it's last in the list.