Deniz Dogan writes: [...]

Even when merging .Xdefaults it doesn't work. Are you by any chance using emacsclient? Because this only seems to happen with the first frame opened with normal Emacs. Any additional frames in the same Emacs instances behave correctly.

I am (I think the -daemon flag is one of the nicest improvements). I also noticed I had some face setting in .emacs, but I removed that and ran emacs-snapshot, and the font is indeed liberation mono (and presumably the size I specified---it looks fine). In my .Xdefaults I've got this: Emacs*FontBackend: xft,x emacs-snapshot.font: liberation mono-9 (The executable is called emacs-snapshot. I also use Emacs 22, with the name "emacs", so I want to be able to configure that too. I think it ignores the FontBackend resource.)