> 
> > After working for a while with no real problems, X won't start up anymore.
> > 
> > The message I get is:
> > 
> > cant locate default font "fixed"
> > 
> > I may have deleted something, but it was unintentional (which means I don't
> > have any idea what it was.)
> > 
> > Any thoughts on how to troubleshoot this?
> 
> My guess would be that the font "fixed" is in fact corrupted.  (Have you 
> had to fsck any time recently and lost an inode or 2?)
> 
> Anyway, I'd get a copy of the X distribution and pull out the fixed font 
> from it.  (I'm not real sure where it goes (but probably in 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts or somewhere close to that).

I think that fixed is usually just an alias (my understanding of fonts in
X11 is sketchy, bear with...), found in, say, 
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc/fonts.alias.  the entry on my system (a digital
unix system, actually, but it shouldn't matter) says something like:
fixed        -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1

try throwing this in and see if that reslves the problem.  perhaps you're
missing that particular font and will need to tell it to use something
else.

hope that makes some sense...

nathan