[TYPO3] Font not getting resized in gifbuilder menu after OS upgrade

[bstone at firstambank.com]

I am having a strange problem with a menu that it is dynamically created in
a typo3 3.5 environment. I am currently moving an existing typo3
environment to new Linux systems (for security reasons) so that they can be
fully patched at the OS level (our current environment is running on RedHat
9..
After moving the typo3 environment it appears that all things are working
correctly except for a menu that gets dynamically created (I think using
gifbuilder).
The menu is getting created correctly in the correct color, but it appears
that the font is not getting resized at all. In reading about this, I
recall that for image quality / readability purposes a font first gets
rendered as an image, then resized, then blended into the new .gif image
for the menu. The finished image ends up in the “typo3temp” directory.
Here is an example of a portion of the menu that was created correctly:
http://www.joeslab.com/m_ad069abf81.gif
Here is an example of a portion of the menu that was not created correctly:
http://www.joeslab.com/m_ea6fe6366c.gif
As you can see the texted never gets resized.
 I am thinking this is something that can be solved in the configuration
because it works fine on the other boxes. I just know I am missing
something.

Here are the things that I tried so far:

1) Tested to make sure “gd” works on the system (It worked fine).
2) Tested to make sure “ImageMagick” convert program works as a standalone
with finding custom fonts (It worked fine).
3) Tested to make sure “ImageMagick” works in the web environment and can
write to the appropriate temp directories (It worked fine).

One interesting question I can ask directly is if anyone knows if there is
another temp directory used for image processing aside from “typo3temp”. I
am thinking either GD or ImageMagick is performing two functions here. One
is a function to trim down the font (this is based on something I read)
which would need a temp directory, then another to spit out the finished
image (which I know goes into typo3temp. I ask because I had to fix the
permissions on typo3temp to get it working where I have it now.

If anyone has any ideas they can throw my way that would be very welcome.