Font rendering problem in F8 KDE

[Mike]

Until today the rendering of text in KDE3.5 in F8 was OK...

I went to the KDE Control Centre and changed the font settings - 
Once I restarted an app the text rendering was awful... after logging
back in to KDE all text fonts are rendered badly. I set them to DejaVu Sans 10
apart from the fixed width which is DejaVu Sans mono 10, and Window Title which
is DejaVu Sans 12.

I set the fonts back to what I thought they were before but the fonts 
are now awful and ugly. I seem to be unable to use antialiasing since if
I set to enabled and then open the configure dialogue then I cannot select
"ue sub-pixel hinting" - the check box won't activate!

I seem to remember having some similar problem way back in F7 or earlier but
I don't know where to start in trying to fix this...

Can someone offer any suggestions to get this fixed?

Thanks