xrvt-unicode small letters 'w' and 'm'
 

This is sort of weird, and hard to explain. In uxrvt, my 'w' and 'm' letters are tiny.

Here's a screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/IFqpe.png

this is my ~/.Xdefaults:
and my .bashrc
(stock, obviously)

Any ideas what's going on?

In case it's a font problem rather than a urxvt problem, try changing font. Here's an example (hopefully the default font is not Liberation Mono!):

In your screenshot it appears to only occur in the output of ls. Does it happen anywhere else?

So that worked to fix that problem, but now the terminal windows are a funny size (stretched out horizontally).

like so: http://i.imgur.com/oJtaJ.png

---------- Post added 05-19-11 at 12:55 PM ----------

Yes, I changed my bash prompt to add a color and it appeared there, too.

It looks to me to be some kind of conflict between the font and the ansi color code rendering then. I assume you tried it in other terminals too and it only appears in rxvt?

I can only suggest you try some different fonts and see if you can find one you like that doesn't show the problem. You might also try playing around with some of the other font settings found in catkin's example.

Then search for bug reports in rxvt if you can.

Try the "DejaVu Sans Mono" font.

I don't see any issues in the original post, that's just the way the "Fixed" fond looks like. What I don't understand, however, is why the ls output text is antialiased.