unreadable fonts in gnucash on Ubuntu "Breezy Badger"

[sethg at ropine.com (Seth Gordon)]

My wife and I each have a laptop.  Hers is a Dell Inspiron 1100, and
mine is a Thinkpad T22.

My Thinkpad was running Debian "woody", and then I changed APT
repositories to upgrade it to Ubuntu "Hoary Hedgehog".  Recently I
upgraded from that to "Breezy Badger".

The Dell had been running Mandrake aka Mandriva, but after seeing how
much better Ubuntu handled wireless cards and printer configuration, we
decided to switch.  When I upgraded the Ubuntu distribution on my
laptop, I installed it on hers, wiping out the partition that had
contained all the Linux stuff other than /home.

Then I installed Gnucash on the Inspiron (it had been running Gnucash
before when it was a Mandriva machine, just fine).  Unfortunately, I
couldn't *run* Gnucash under Ubuntu on the Inspiron, because the fonts
were so distorted as to be unreadable
(http://dynamic.ropine.com/img/weird-font-screenshots/gnucash.png).  The
same was true for xfontsel
(http://dynamic.ropine.com/img/weird-font-screenshots/xfontsel.png).
When my wife switched the application font to Helvetica, we saw the same
effect appear in some other applications
(http://dynamic.ropine.com/img/weird-font-screenshots/gimp.png),
although the text frequently re-rendered properly if we just moused over it.

We found a page on the Ubuntu wiki (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Gtk1Fonts)
describing how to set up a .gtkrc.mine file to change the fonts for Gtk1
applications.  When we modified the fontset in this file and reran
Gnucash, the text fields would have different dimensions, corresponding
to the dimensions of the font we had chosen, but the text was still
unreadable.  This happened with iso8859-1 fontsets, with iso10646-1
fontsets, and with 6x10.

Going to System->Preferences->Font from the Ubuntu desktop and tweaking
the settings there doesn't seem to help.

All of this distortion is happening on the Inspiron.  On the Thinkpad,
the Gnucash text shows up just fine.

WTF?  Any ideas on how this can be fixed? (Other than "wait for Gnucash
2.0.0"....)

#include "anti-x-windows-rant.h"