Fontconfig problem with italic font!?

Mats Lidell writes:

 >     Fontconfig warning: FcPattern object size does not accept value 100(i)
 >     Fontconfig warning: FcPattern object size does not accept value True

I guess that you (or XEmacs) has font specs that look like
"TimesRoman-Italic" where the key point is that the first hyphen in
the spec is not followed by a number and (optionally) a series of
colon-prefixed options.  That is, a fontconfig spec has the syntax

    FONTNAME-SIZE:OPTION:OPTION:OPTION...

where in FONTNAME pretty much any character is permitted, except that
"-" and "\" must be escaped by "\".  If SIZE is omitted, the prefixing
hyphen must be omitted, too.

My best guess is that you're passing XLFD-style specs to fontconfig.
Those are the ones with up to 14 hyphens in them.