I had this very same problems, which I traced to my installation of Xft and Fontconfig from fontconfig.org. I got rid of those, and everything was peachy. The solution was to remove Xft2 and Fontconfig, as those are incompatible with xftcache. According to Keith Packard, xftcache is obsolete in favor of fccache. Search google for xftcache and speedo, many people have reported this to various mailing lists. -jwb