problems starting Gnopernicus

[thenerd rmisp net]

Hi.  I'm running an Arch Linux  0.6 system with kernel 2.4.25.  I've
successfully compiled Gnome-speech and Gnopernicus, but I'm having trouble
starting Gnopernicus.  After I start Gnome, I hit alt-f2 to bring up the
run box and type gnopernicus and press enter.  After I do that, I hear a
beep, but no speech.  I hit ctrl-f1 to go to the console and I see the
following messages:
gnopernicus-Message: speech initialization succeded

(srcore:18549): GConf-CRITICAL **: file gconf.c: line 3243
(gconf_engine_set_string): assertion `g_utf8_validate (val, -1, NULL)'
failed
I/O warning : failed to load external entity
"/usr/local/share/gnopernicus/presentation/%0B%84%06%08%13=%06%08h%F9%FF%BF%96%0

gnopernicus-ERROR **: File
"/usr/local/share/gnopernicus/presentation/\u000b\x06\u0006\u0008\u0013=\u0006\u0008h\xff\xbf\x96\x0b\u000b\u0005\u0008\u0001.xml"
cannot be parsed.

aborting...

(gnopernicus:18548): gnopernicus-WARNING **: srcore exited.
Xlib:  extension "RENDER" missing on display ":0.0".

What does this mean and how can I fix it?
Thanks for your help.