A colleague has a bizarre font problem on his new MIPS workstation.
When he first logs on (via xdm), he has a single xterm window appear
with the mwm window manager running.  In this configuration, X windows
applications (particularly xdvi) work fine.  However, if he opens up a
second xterm application, suddenly xdvi cannot start in either window,
giving the error: Unable to load ISO 8859-1 font.

   The only difference between the two xterm windows is that the initial
one references a different name in the Xsession file, with prettier
colours and other slight changes.  Further investigation shows that only
opening a default xterm causes this behaviour, and more significant, ALL
X applications can no longer load any fonts if they are invoked from the
command line in either window.  If I start the xterm with a different
font (using the -fn option), no problems.  It would seem that the
default xterm is loading a font which somehow causes the server to lose
all of its fonts.  Note: xlsfonts in either window shows all of the
fonts available, so there doesn't appear to be a problem in the font
directories/hash-tables.

   Other than rewriting the XTerm app-defaults file to use a different
font and hope for the best, does anyone have any ideas?