Thanks to all who answered my X11 question.  I reloaded from a distribution
and all was well.  The queer thing about it is that when I re-ran 'mkfontdir'
with the new font in place it did The Right Thing and I have had no problems
since.  I'm still curious as to what happened.

FYI:
    - perms were OK (444).

    - ktrace showed X opening, reading (and apparently parsing), and closing
      the fonts.dir and fonts.alias files successfully.

    - fonts.alias listed "fixed some-long-font-name-here-forget-which-one"
      and fonts.dir listed
      "some-long-font-name-here-forget-which-one somefont.pcf"

    - the listed font was present in the directory stated ($X11LIB/fonts/misc)
      and was readable.

The behaviour had all the earmarks of something being out of date with
respect to the rest of the system, and I have _no_ blinking idea as to
what could have happened, as I don't know what kind of time/date inter-
dependencies exist within the X hierarchy.


				--*greywolf;
--
The typical attitude of most UN*X-based microcomputers has turned into "Well,
gee, now that we have to play with the little kids, we don't wanna play at
all."  You don't think that Sun and SGI are going to continue the charade
of UN*X, do you, now that one can get sources to UN*X on the 'net?