Fonts totally gone in konqueror

[Ross Boylan <RossBoylan@stanfordalumni.org>]

I am running a Debian/testing system with KDE2, and have built KDE 3
from cvs, installing it to its own directory.  This is a vanilla KDE
build, not one making Debian packages.

I did this a few months ago and KDE3 basically worked.  Then one day, it
stopped working.  I assumed this was because I had updated some
library underneath via apt-get.  KDE2 continues to be fine.

I just rebuilt KDE3 from source, and am seeing one problem from before:
Konqueror doesn't display fonts at all.  That is, where glyphs for
characters should appear on the screen, there is nothing.  So the KDE
help is totally blank, except for the graphic at the top of the page.
Other pages show me horizontal lines where text should be.

Konqueror shows the text OK when it does a directory listing.  I see
fonts fine in shells; I even see them in KWord.

Conceivably the help problem has a different source than the more
general text viewing problem.

Can anyone suggest where to start looking for the cause of this
problem?  A solution would be even nicer!

Thanks.