interesting. it turns out once I had shutdown my 2011 install last night after updating and booted this morning, the font I had been using for the active and inactive titlebar font for over a year no longer works. here's a screen, as you can see the font is shown but doesn't work in the titlebar.

edit: two packages were removed during the updates I did yesterday on my 2011 install..
jadetex and xmltex. I don't know if that's what caused the font to stop working or not.