Hi together

I updated Emacs-Snapshot on Debian Etch two days ago. Since then, all
italic and bold fonts are displayed in a tiny, almost illegible
fontsize. It happens only under X. 

Additionally, since the update, Emacs starts with a rapid flickering
frame, changing its size from fullscreen to a few centimeters and back
again several times until the program is up.

Does anybody where the problem could be and how to solve it?

I'm using abobe-courier as default font. I should add that there were
also updates for X.org coming with the same update.

Thanks for help

Sven