Ok... This is amusing...

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 8/18/05, Michael H. Warfield <mhw at wittsend.com> wrote:
>         So...  Now...  I restart Firefox.  NO CHARACTERS!  Almost blank (text
> free) pages.  Images are fine but it's like there is no character set
> and/or all the typed letters are blank.  Sigh...  Didn't expect that!

you may need to disable  pango support in the /usr/bin/firefox script.
look for this snippet:

##
## Set MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO is no longer used because Pango is enabled by default
## you may use MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 to force disabling of pango
##
MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO


-jef