Fonts eventually exhaused under gnome-2.2.2

[Naoki Saito <saito math ucdavis edu>]

Hello.

I recently upgraded my desktop machine from Redhat9 to Redhat Enterprise 
Linux WS 3 (RHELWS3).
Then, I encountered the problems I haven't had before.
The problem is about fonts.
When I login, I do not have any problem for a while.
Then eventually, when I try to invoke some applications such as GNU emacs,
it quits saying "No Fonts Founds."  At this point, when I do:
$ xlfonts
No list of fonts is returned.
In the beginning of the session/login, the same xlsfonts lists a tons of
fonts available on the system.

Now, when I quit my login session and login again, I can use all these fonts,
but eventually the same thing happens: fonts cannot be found.

It is very inconvenient to logout in the middle of doing something due to
this font problem.  The current window manager is gnome-2.2.2 under RHELWS3.

How can I fix this annoying problem?
I would greatly appreciate your help!

Thanks a lot!
Naoki Saito (UC Davis)