Various terminal display problems

[Ross Boylan <RossBoylan@stanfordalumni.org>]

About a week or two ago a number of things changed in my terminals.

1) The default font in my xterm's became one with incredibly wide
spacing between the characters.  It looked like a very stretched out
fixed width font.

2) My .Xresources on root is 
XTerm*scrollBar: on
XTerm*saveLines: 9000
XTerm*background: red3

I get it with alias getre='xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources'
Yet my backgrounds went from red to white.

3) My Konsole started with funny size fonts and I had to reset them
(may not have been the same time).

Unfortunately, I didn't note exactly when this started (and #3 may not
have been the same time), so I don't know exactly which installs were
at the same time.  I run mostly testing.  The only packages
updated/installed in this period that look at all related are 
kdelibs 4:2.2.2-13.woody.8 (earlier messages on this list reported
problems with AA fonts with this install, but would that affect
xterm?);
libncurses derived packages;
base-config and base-files.

Playing with xterm from the command line, I find:
xterm -bg red3
starts a red terminal.
xterm -fa
"-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--18-180-75-75-p-98-iso10646-1"
and xterm -fn fixed
look reasonable (they do differ from each other).
xrdb -query reports 
xterm*Font:  -adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--18-180-75-75-p-98-iso10646-1
*fontList:   -monotype-times new roman-medium-r-normal--18-180-75-75-p-0-iso8859-1,-monotype-times new roman-bold-r-normal--18-180-75-75-p-0-iso8859-1=BOLD,-monotype-times new roman-medium-i-normal--18-180-75-75-p-0-iso8859-1=ITALIC
(not sure if the latter is relevant)

However, xterm -fn
"-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--18-180-75-75-p-98-iso10646-1" looks
bad, identical to xterm as far as I can tell.

One other thought: in this time, I also restarted the computer, after
it had been running for 44 days.  So I suppose I might have picked up
a change to XFree (4.2.1-6) that I actually made quite awhile ago.

I have many font related utilities installed, such as fontconfig,
defoma, truetype fonts, installed.

Can anyone provide insight into what's going on, what I need to do to
fix things, and whether I should file a bug (and where)?

Thanks.