I notice that in 21.0-b66 the splash screen is slightly different than what it used to be. The copyright statements are in bold-italic. However, in b65 the actual font used is: (face-font-name (find-face 'bold-italic)) => "-adobe-courier-bold-o-*-*-*-120-75-75-*-*-*-*" But b66 says: (face-font-name (find-face 'bold-italic)) "-*-courier-bold-i-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*" The main difference is that in b66 bold-italic is pretty ugly because it (I think) the server uses the scalable courier font and creates an italic version out of it. What it used to do use get the oblique version, for which there is a nice-looking bitmap font. I haven't changed anything in my setup between these versions. I still have *try-oblique-before-italic-fonts* set to T, so obviously something is different. The obvious workaround is to set these fonts explicitly. Not what I wanted because that happens too late for the splash screen. Ray