KDE font woes

[Chris Horn <irrationality@comcast.net>]

I have a very puzzling problem.  I've been fiddling with fonts and KDE all 
night, but been unable to make them work when I'm using KDE, logged in as my 
user.

When I log in as root and run kcontrol, everything is pretty.  Fonts work and 
life seems good.  When I run kcontrol, or kmail, as my user, though, only a 
very small set of [crappy] fonts appear in any of the KDE font choosing 
menus.

I'm running an unstable updated tonight.  I have tried using X's (4.2.1) 
native font handling, or whatever it's called - specifying font paths through 
the XF86Config-4 file.  That mostly worked, but the fonts looked like crap - 
quite jagged.  So, I put on xfs-xtt, told X to use that, and now my fonts 
look great in all applications that aren't KDE-based.

What's the deal here?  Why do fonts look fine when I'm root, but not a user?  
I don't use the KDE desktop (or any desktop environment, for that matter) and 
have no desire to.  Will KDE just not play nicely with non-KDE font systems?

Please help.
chris horn.