unable to adjust fonts in my own builds on SuSE Linux

This is a long standing problem I've had. It simply has not been high on my priorities. I've decided to address it. If I build XEmacs on my own, I find that I am unable to set the font size displayed in the buffer. When I attempt to use the menue to change the font size, it effects the size of the fonts in the modeline, but not in the edit buffer. The SuSE built version works fine. Does anybody know how to fix this? I'm most interesting in using en_US.UTF-8. TIA, -- STH