David, John is right, I think - in your case, you don't need .fonts.conf pointing back to a system font location, but there is a possibility that changing the file could have made things work for him, since .fonts.conf would have been newer than the font cache files.
Sometimes you can fix font problems just by running 'sudo fc-cache'. http://fink.sourceforge.net/faq/usage-fink.php?phpLang=en#fc-cache -- - Charles Lepple
