When I use Bless it tries to find a font called utf-8, and fails. When I use the character map it wants to install fonts even when there is already a font there. It searches and fails to find one. I could really do without this "feature". Any ideas on how to make it stop?

never used that hex editor on fedora
i always used the already installed ghex

just HOW did you install this program ?
from some googling bless needs MONO and gtk#
so how did you also install mono and gtk#

if you used yum and the fedora repos then yum would have pulled in the required font

The utf-8 is definitely not a font, but a character encoding set.

I suspect you have an application dependency issue.

If you're running the default Fedora 15, it does not have GTK2 libraries that
are needed for Bless to run.

So basically speaking Bless runs on an older version of GTK. GTK2 is being
replaced on Fedora with the new GTK3.

From what I read, Bless hasn't had a new release since 2009 and would need an
updated version or you can try installing the needed GTK2 2.8 libraries.

Here's the Bless site that tells you what Bless requires to run properly:
http://home.gna.org/bless/index.html