gdm error

["J. Gardner Biggs" <gardnerbiggs houston rr com>]

I have always installed garnome to /opt/gnome-2.5.x, that being said I
usually delete the old garnome dirs and keep the last couple installs
around for good measure.

My current installtion is to /opt/gnome-2.5.91

Trying to logout puts me into an endless loop of the X startup screen
and the blue screen of gnome-2.

rebooting and running gdmsetup gives this:

** (gnome_segv:2368): WARNING **: No builtin or dynamically loaded
modules
were found. Pango will not work correctly. This probably means
there was an error in the creation of:
  '/opt/gnome-2.5.4/etc/pango/pango.modules'
You may be able to recreate this file by running pango-querymodules.
 
(gnome_segv:2368): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: file gobject.c: line 1561
(g_object_ref): assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
 
** (gnome_segv:2368): CRITICAL **: file pango-engine.c: line 68
(_pango_engine_shape_shape): assertion `PANGO_IS_FONT (font)' failed
 
** ERROR **: file shape.c: line 75 (pango_shape): assertion failed:
(glyphs->num_glyphs > 0)
aborting...

obviously there is no more /opt/gnome-2.5.4 anymore, and running
pango-querymodules does not help.

Any ideas?  This is a major show-stopper.