Gno fonts in GNOME (not pango problem)

[Mark J. Reed]

For some reason I have no fonts in GNOME.  It's not the pango problem;
my pango.modules is fully populated and world readable, as are all the
directories it references.  But when I do a cleanup and start gnome from
scratch, all text disappears as soon as it gets to the globe+arrow logo.
I assume from this that it's a locale problem, but I have no idea where
to go from there.  I also get empty .gnome2/share/?(cursor-)fonts/fonts.dir
files - or actually, containing just the single character '0'.   Dunno
if that's related or if it just means I don't have my own custom fonts.

Any help?

-Mark