The subject line pretty much says it all, except that the problem occurs on a Slackware64 13.37 multilib system. In applications, terminals, everywhere there are no letters, only boxes. I tried reinstalling pango as suggested in many places with no change. The other user and root user are fine in xfce, and the affected user is fine in kde.

Does anyone have any ideas about this?

Thanks,
Brian

For this new user...what does
issued at a terminal report?

It reports:

which is the same list as the functioning user.

Brian

Could it be a theme issue? Maybe changing a few settings might help..

am i stating the obvious if i say it's a font issue?

make sure the font currently used is available for all users.
on my system, it seems changing some font settings needs a full reboot.
reinstall font rendering packages.

I had a similar problem with XFCE and certain apps after an upgrade to 14.1. In my my case the solution was to run pango-querymodules. More-or-less as described in this Gentoo forum thread here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7418900.html

@arsivci0: I can't really set or change themes since it is impossible to navigate through screens and menus when there is no text.

@ondoho: nothing wrong with pointing out the obvious...I don't know how you restrict/unrestrict users from using certain fonts. Shouldn't a new user be defaulting to available fonts anyway? Also I did reinstall pango.

@croxen: I tried your suggestion but it didn't work. I regenerated the pango.modules file in /etc/pango/x86_64-slackware-linux, and also tried putting it in /etc/pango.

Thanks,
Brian

As root, you could go to the home directory of the user with the problem and If need be even I've found that the only problems I've ever had with XFCE giving goofy displays was when something got corrupted (due to me playing around), and until I deleted the .cache material the problem could not be fixed. Hope this helps.

i meant if maybe you set your apps to use a font that is installed in another users home.
admitted, very unlikely.
or if the font has been deleted meanwhile.

anyhow i can confirm this approach:
"rm -f -R .cache"
although i don't know if it will help, but it's sth i've done a few times. no harm.

Too bad, I thought reverse video would work, on mouse-over the colors would reverse and something would be visible.

Last resort: go back to console, backup user's files, delete user, recreate another.

Clearing out everything in her home directory did not help. Creating new test users show that this problem happens with every new user I create now. This problem starts from the initial login, so all font settings should be "default".

Brian

I have solved the problem. It resulted from a sloppy font configuration I had done a long time ago when I did not expect to have multiple users on this machine. More specifically I had put some fonts in a directory in the working user's home and referenced that directory in my /etc/fonts/local.conf file. This directory was obviously not available to the new users, which caused problems only for xfce. By moving that directory to a common location, changing the ownership and permissions and updating the local.conf file I was able to resolve the problem.

Thanks to all who contributed their ideas.

Brian

Edit: PS. ...which kind of begs the question, why would xfce default to a locally installed font?