Wine won't show any characters after the first run

[David D. Hagood]

I'm having a strange problem with Wine - it will not show any characters 
in any windows, UNLESS I delete Wine's registry files - then it will 
show characters for the first program run, but no other programs 
thereafter (including repeat runs of the first program).

So, for example, I can run "winecfg" and it will show the config window, 
with 2 rows of tabs, but no text anywhere. If I then delete 
~/.wine/*.reg and re-run winecfg, it will show the characters, and 
interestingly enough it will place the tabs in one long row rather than 
2 rows. If I then run, say, regedit, it will NOT show any characters at 
all. If I exit winecfg and re-run it, it will now show no characters, 
and it will place the tabs into 2 rows.

I've run it with WINEDEBUG=+font and don't see anything screamingly 
obvious in terms of errors.

This is with a fresh full checkout from CVS as of yesterday (11 Apr 
2006), built, and installed (after removing /usr/include/wine, 
/usr/lib/wine, and /usr/bin/wine*), under SuSE 9.3.

Soooo - any suggestions for things to look for?