gdm2 fonts rendering incorrectly

[jay docherty com]

Here's the situation.  I'm runing Gnome 2.2 with Debian
Sid, on a IBM Thinkpad R32 with a ATI Radeon 700 video
card.  Its up to date with the current Sid
reposatories.  I have AGP support compiled in the
2.4.20 kernel and I'm loading the radeon driver as a
module. I was able to get Gdm 2.4.1.3 from an alternate
apt source.  Gdm when in standard greeter mode looks
perfect.  My problem comes when I switch it to
graphical greeter.  The fonts appear to be hardly
visable.  Its looks like the letters are saturated by
the background.  Like, for some reason is render AA
fonts incorrectly.  Here's some of the things I tried
to fix it.

I've tried running X in different dpi's and different
color depths.  All with the same result.

I've tried isntalling Gdm 2.4.1.3 from two different
apt's and the source directly from gnome.org.  Each
time manually removing all remenants of the previous
install.  Made no difference.

I've tried manipulating the font size and type from any
particular theme's xml files.  The size and change of
type is reflected but the saturation is reflected as
well.

Its really wierd because I can't replicate it in gnome.
 I've been trying to but everything seems to work
perfectly in gnome.  Any ideas?