After upgrading GTK, can't get GNOME going

["David Berlind" <David Berlind cnet com>]

Hello, I'm hoping someone can help me with what appears to be a GNOME
problem
that was instigated by my attempt to install a newer version of GTK.

I was trying to upgrade Ethereal and descended into a downward spiral
that had me upgrading a bunch of things the new version depended on
including Pango.  On the config, Pango complained that it couldn't
find X11 or Freetype and so, at the suggestion of some install advice
on GTK+ web site (GTK+ required by Ethereal), I installed fontconfig
and Freetype.

Well, my Xfree86 config went poof and all I could get was the console.
The ensuing "complaint" contained the text "No fonts found; this
probably means that the fontconfig library is not correctly
configured."  So, I searched hi and lo and saw suggestions like
running fc-cache -v and tried everything I could find until I finally
gave up and followed other advice that said just to reinstall xfree86.

So, I did that.  I downloaded everything, ran the install
script....and still no worky.  Eventually, I got some help (was given
some advice on fixing XFree86 config, and I made some progress,
but not a lot.  

The GUI would start to come up, I'd get the mousepointer (the "X") 
and could move it about with the mouse, but no windows or GUI.   

CTRL-ALT-BKSP took me back to the console, and I saw the following 
complaints:

>Could not init font path element /user/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF,
removing from list!!
>Could not init font path element /user/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID,
removing from list!!

Got some more help, moved the XFree86 config file into the X11 directory
and this brings us to my current problem.  The startx command (as well
as boot into runlevel 5) results gives me a GUI, but it only has 3, 
monochromatic terminal windows, and a clock.  No GNOME. I'm using Red
Hat and ran switchdesk GNOME, but with no improvement.

If I kill the GUI (run "exit" from the prompt), I see the following:

"Cannot convert string "" to XftFont"

Any help anybody can provide to get me back int working shape would be
greatly appreciated.

David  david.berlind AT cnet.com