Just to let you know, your specs aren't in your signature.
Are you using woody (stable) or sarge/sid (testing/unstable)?
How did you do the install? apt sources? from where?
I'm looking at doing the same thing in the next couple days, but KDE 3.2 is kinda shaky on Debian, as of yet. There are some dependancy issues, needing to mix packages between testing/unstable, and things don't always play nice. Those issues are described here:
http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianKDE
Now, it sounds like you don't have fonts properly configured. This might be a relic from installation - maybe the right font packages weren't installed. These should have come with the basic X installation though... Read section 4 of the FONT HOWTO:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Font-HOWTO/
and make sure your font paths exist and are properly referenced in configuration files.
Let me know how things go - like I said, I'm going to be doing the same thing sometime this week, so if you can post more detailed information I'm happy to help you out. Or at least share the pain.
--Rounan