X fonts problems. nothing available for helvetica

["Alan Bailward" <alan@northco.net>]

Hi there.  Appologies for re-hashing this.

Just upgraded my system for the first time in a couple of months with slink.
Everything mostly went right, but I have had some problems with X.  When
starting it, my windowmanager (windowmaker) complains with a message like:

Can't load font -*-helvetica-bold-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-*. Trying fixed.

>From the following thread
(http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-user-9811/threads.html#01674)
it seems that the fault is of the new break up in the xfont/xbase packages.
The resolution from the mailing list archives seems to be nuke all of X and
re-install.  I'd rather not do that though :)  (though it is possible of
course).

I've tried purging all of the xfonts packages I have, and re-installing them
but to no avail.  If anyone can help me 'easily' fix this, I'd appreciate it
a lot.

Thanks a lot.

Alan
alan@northco.net
www.northco.net/alan