23.0.60; 'default' face not set properly in new frame

[Tim Van Holder]

In GNU Emacs 23.0.60.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.8.20)
 of 2008-03-07 on leeloo
Windowing system distributor `RealVNC Ltd', version 11.0.3370
configured using `configure  '--with-x-toolkit=gtk' '--with-x' 
'--with-freetype' '--with-xft' '--with-libotf''

Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8
  value of $XMODIFIERS: nil
  locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

While in an ediff-buffers session, I executed M-x make-frame to get a new
window. That newly created window did not have the correct font set (it
used Adobe Courier while I have the default face customized to use the
Terminus font).
M-x customize-face default showed it as "SAVED and set" with courier as
the font family. "Reset to saved settings" caused both frames to be
repainted, using the correct font.
Another M-x make-frame once again used the wrong font, so it seems
something goes wrong during frame creation causing new frames to get an
incorrectly set default face.