text/Fonts missing in certain apps ???

[anthony <mailinganthony@googlemail.com>]

Dear Debian-users,

I have been using Debian etch for some six months and mostly it has been going well. 

However, after a few recent changes (I'm not sure which one caused the problem so I'm going to list them) I lost the text in the menus of several applications : 

Ardour
Audacity
Xmms

The apps work, but when I click on the menus I just get a blank grey box pull down menu with no indication of what the menu items are.

So, here's the list of recent changes, which one do you think affected the loss of menus/text?

I recently switched to blackbox
/fluxbox so I deleted gnome-desktop, gnome and a load of other stuff I assumed was redundant

I managed to break X, I think by using Sarge repositories (to get a version of VLC working, and no it did not work) 

I fixed X by re-installing Xorg and the packages suggested when X didn't work and instead I got error messages

So, I think thats it , all my other apps are fine (except Nicotine which opens but has no menus at all just one big grey box, but its been like that for a while). Should I reinstall fonts? give nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf some direction as to what fonts to use. install some bit of GTK?? 

I'm stuck and need some help

Thanks
Anthony