When both tgif and xfonts-cyrillic (version 4.1.0-5) are installed, tgif seems to use the cyrillic fonts. Since latin characters are not defined in these fonts, most text (menu, messages, status line) shows only empty rectangles instead of characters. I suppose that refined application settings will fix this. For the time being, I have removed xfonts-cyrillic, since I don't need it (but it is in task-x-server). The bug is also present in the most recent version (4.1.40). This is debian/unstable as of yesterday on ix86 (PIII) with a Matrox G 400. Yours, Thomas <t.steffen@tu-harburg.de>