Phil Perry wrote:
> On 13/04/11 15:47, Alec T. Habig wrote:
>   
>> David M. Cooke writes:
>>     
>>> Several users started complaining today about various X apps, such
>>> as xterm and emacs, that no longer look the way they want.  It looks
>>> like the resources they set in their .Xresources files are no longer
>>> set.
>>>       
>> Same in EL6.  The changelog for this package says:
>>
>> * Wed Mar 16 2011 Adam Jackson<[log in to unmask]>  7.4-15.el6_0.1
>> - cve-2011-0465: Sanitize cpp macro expansion. (CVE 2011-0465)
>>
>> which sounds like something that could indeed break .Xresources parsing.
>> Although in my case, not only old-style X apps lost their fonts marbles,
>> but so did the KDE programs, menus, etc -- which I didn't think used the
>> old-style X fonts at all.
>>
>> After wasting 15 minutes resetting fonts in many different places, X is
>> usable again.  I'm sure Murphy's Law says that this bug will be fixed
>> tomorrow and we'll all have to re-reset things :)
>>
>>     
>
> Thanks for your posts David and Alec. I thought I was losing my marbles 
> when all my fonts went screwy on EL5/KDE so good to know the root cause.
>
>   

One of the posters in the bugzilla entry noted the -nocpp option on 
xrdb.  The following works great:

$ xrdb -nocpp -merge .Xresources


I've added it to my session startup commands and helped some users do 
the same.