Well, the thing is, it is not "my" font - I have absolutely no idea what font it is, no other program beside Emacs is trying to use it, and, of course, I didn't install it myself. I regenerated the font cache - but that had no effect. Unfortunately font configuration, at least in the Linuxes I had to work with is spread over few dozens of files... so, I might be as well missing something. However, There are few changes to configuration that I made myself, I've posted my fonts.conf before, but it doesn't look like it may at all be a problem. I'll copy its content yet again for clarity: none true hintmedium false ~/.fonts Below are the "profiles" of different "font groups" in /etc/fonts/conf.d -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 124 Mar 30 21:0900 kde.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 39 Mar 14 03:24 20-fix-globaladvance.conf -> ../conf.avail/20-fix-globaladvance.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 39 Mar 14 03:24 20-unhint-small-vera.conf -> ../conf.avail/20-unhint-small-vera.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 39 Mar 14 03:29 30-defoma.conf -> /var/lib/defoma/fontconfig.d/fonts.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 Mar 14 03:24 30-metric-aliases.conf -> ../conf.avail/30-metric-aliases.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 Mar 14 03:24 30-urw-aliases.conf -> ../conf.avail/30-urw-aliases.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 Mar 14 03:24 40-nonlatin.conf -> ../conf.avail/40-nonlatin.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Mar 14 03:24 45-latin.conf -> ../conf.avail/45-latin.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Mar 14 03:24 49-sansserif.conf -> ../conf.avail/49-sansserif.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 Mar 14 03:24 50-user.conf -> ../conf.avail/50-user.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Mar 14 03:24 51-local.conf -> ../conf.avail/51-local.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Mar 14 03:24 60-latin.conf -> ../conf.avail/60-latin.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 35 Mar 14 03:24 65-fonts-persian.conf -> ../conf.avail/65-fonts-persian.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 Mar 14 03:24 65-nonlatin.conf -> ../conf.avail/65-nonlatin.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Mar 14 03:24 69-unifont.conf -> ../conf.avail/69-unifont.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 40 Mar 14 03:29 70-no-bitmaps.conf -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Mar 14 03:24 80-delicious.conf -> ../conf.avail/80-delicious.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Mar 14 03:24 90-synthetic.conf -> ../conf.avail/90-synthetic.conf The rest of the files in /etc/fonts/ directory are exactly the same as they would be on other similar systems - I never modified them. The date is the date of this system was installed. kde.conf is a bit older - this is because after installing the defaults I've struggled for a while with anti-aliasing, but, finally, it seems like I've found a way to remove it completely. Sorry, most of my life I've been a graphic artist, with books and fonts being my primary occupation. This is why I think that computer AA fonts are a mistake (but I don't want to go into this dispute)... Anyway, if you have any suggestion about where should I look for the font (I wouldn't mind fixing the font file itself!) I certainly will. My problem is, however - I have absolutely no idea why and where does Emacs find the settings that it is using. If I could suggest... there is an option to set default font, and it lists some values that cannot be interpreted as a font name. To be honest, I don't even know what they mean, at first, I assumed those are the sizes in pixels of the piece of screen allocated to draw a single glyph in the monospace font, but that doesn't hold, those are neither em-squares, no height of the roman majuscule or minuscule characters, nor with accents or descents nor any other such combination... What I mean is these "names": Default, fixed, 6x10, 6x12, 6x13, 7x13, 7x14, 8x13, 9x15, 10x20, 11x18, 12x24, clean 5x8, clean 6x8, clean 8x8, clean 8x10, clean 8x14, clean 8x16, sony 8x16, lucidasanstypewriter-12, lucidasanstypewriter-bold-14, lucidasanstypewriter-bold-24. I also don't have Lucida font installed on my system and never had. One more thing, not sure if it helps clarify anything: Emacs doesn't use the same fonts as all other KDE applications do when rendering the menus (it uses some elongated sans-serif font, which, proportionally, resembles Helvetica, i.e. it is taller then Arial, and because of this letters stand closer to each other some times hiding pieces of the next letter. Also, because it uses the same font it uses for regular text for hints (tips), the text in tips is trimmed from the bottom by few pixels. Screenshot attached. By the way, something similar happened to me with Emacs 23 too. It didn't crash though, but it used some fonts I couldn't identify / find on my system, but using some color scheme fixed that in a mysterious way. Inside attachment: emacs-23-menu-bar.png - this is how menu bar looks in Emacs 23 on the same desktop, the rest of KDE applications look just like that too. emacs-24-menu-bar.png - this is how menu bar looks in Emacs 24. emacs-missing-font-1.png - the tip (hint) with the font trimmed. Best. Oleg