Fonts causing programs to segfault, titlebars to disappear

[calcwatch]

I have a strange problem with Gnome when displaying text in certain Unicode subsets... in particular Devanagari and Gurmukhi (and probably more Indian languages, but I can't rememeber.)

I am using Arial Unicode MS to display them, and I think I had them working correctly up until recently -- I first noticed problems after I installed media-fonts/corefonts, a masked fonts package.

If I load text in the above alphabets in gedit, the program immediately segfaults. What is stranger though, is that if I try loading a page in Hindi in Mozilla (for example, http://www.bbc.co.uk/hindi/) gnome-panel segfaults repeatedly and eventually stops working. Each time this happens, the screen clears, revealing the background image, and then refreshes all of the windows. Also, each time the the refresh occurs, every window on the desktop is moved about 10 pixels down and to the right.

When everything finally stops, the page displays correctly, but gnome-panel and all of the titlebars are gone. The only way I have found to get things back to normal is to do Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and restart Gnome. Oddly, this seems to happen only with Indian languages; Chinese and Japanese text loads in Arial Unicode MS without any trouble.

I realized I probably should not have set up that masked package, so I unmerged it. I also tried downgrading from freetype 2.1.4 to 2.1.3-r2, but that didn't solve the problem.

Here are a couple of screenshots:

http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/rc235/Random/before.jpeg
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/rc235/Random/after.jpeg

Does anyone know what's going on?

Thanks.