What locale are you using? I haven't seen this behavior

It is a weird one, and i've done a rm -rf on the user dot files and still get this issue. A new user on the system however, does get the correct fonts so it is something user specific, but like I said I was working in Open Office fine before the last update and no other application is having this trouble and it is not in the
.openoffice.org2 directory.
Here is my locale out put, any ideas would be greatly appreciated, I do (did) use Open Office quite a bit.
$locale
LANG=en_US.utf8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.utf8"
LC_TIME="en_US.utf8"
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MONETARY="en_US.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.utf8"
LC_NAME="en_US.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8"
LC_ALL=

Try copying the working user's .openoffice.org2/ to your user's $HOME.

No luck, it even opened a setup wizard using the webdings font because the username was different.

Try diffing all the dotfiles for the two users and see if you can find anything relevent. If not, I'd say ask in #openoffice or similar. I'm going to stop watching this bug, catch me on irc sometime.

Thanks for all your help. I will keep this open and post the solution as soon as I find it, it's been awkward to lose my word processor of choice in the last few weeks of the semester, hate for someone else to go through it.

I coulnd't reproduce this exact problem, but I had a problem with fonts that got solved by not applying my KDE style to my GTK apps (in KDE Control Center). Could you check if using for example "Clearlooks" (you'll need gtk-engines) for your GTK apps solves the problem for you?

Well, no luck. I logged into a KDE session as this user, set the GTK look to Human in the control center and tested OO, and it worked fine. Logged back into an XFCE4 session, made sure that was set to Human too, but OO still has webdings font?

Ah, I thought the problem happened in KDE. But it seems that it works fine in KDE and it doesn't in XFCE? That's weird. And it also seems related to your XFCE settings for that user, right? Since you said that logging as new user it did work...

In OO, if you go to Tools->Options->OpenOffice.org->View, there is a setting to "Use system fonts for user interface". Does it make any difference if you change that setting?

Other that that I have no other idea, except checking your XFCE settings for that user and compare them to the other user where it does work.

a friend had this problem, and he solved disabling the "Use system fonts for user interface" option

Juan, where is that option? I tried setting replace webdings with arial in OO, that didn't work. I tried in changing fonts in kcontrol's GTK Styles and Fonts, that did nothing either.

ok..jackson here are the steps to disable that option, i explain in that way because it supposed you can read the options:

close all open openoffice apps

open /opt/openoffice/program/soffice
select tools (4th menu)
select options (last menu)
select openoffice/view (first item at tree, then the 4th)
disable Use system fonts for user interface (unckeck the first checkbox bellow the 2 horizontal aligned combobox)
press accept (the first button of 4 on the bottom of the window)
restart openoffice

i think this instructions will solve your problem

Juan, thanks so much. That did the trick! Great directions too.

I'm glad to hear that it worked. It's what I sugested too a few days ago. Too bad you didn't read it earlier ;-)