Urgent TTF Problem

I recently tried to upgrade to PHP 4.1.1. I'm using a FreeBSD ports system, so it has some default options to build with FreeType 2.0.6 (libfreetype.so.8), GD 1.8.4_5 (libgd.so.2), but no FreeType 1.x libraries (as I later found out). The installation went smoothly, and I tried to make a dynamic image with ImageTTFText, which resulted in the error "Could not find/open font". I verified that the font existed and then someone else suggested that there had to be an absolute reference to the font like "/www/site/fonts/arial.ttf" and not just "fonts/arial.ttf" - I tried changing it and it didn't work still. Same error. Next, I heard someone saying that you need to compile and tack on this: --with-ttf=/usr/local (where my lib and include dirs are). So I manually added that to the configure statement. Recompiled and installation went smoothly again - no errors. But the images still don't work. Someone suggested recompiling and tacking on: --enable-native-gd-ttf (or something like that), which I did and still didn't work after recompiling. So I completely remove FreeType2 references in the configure statement, and recompile. Still doesn't work. I remove --enable-native-gd-ttf (or whatever it was), and it still doesn't work after recompiling. So at this point I have GD 1.8.4_5 and FreeType 1.3.1 being used by PHP 4.1.1, but it still doesn't work. I used to use PHP 4.0.3pl1 with GD 1.8.3 + FreeType 1.3.1, and THAT worked and still works after undoing the upgrade. But I now notice that the $php_errormsg variable is no longer saying "Could not find/open font" but it's now blank. Everything SEEMS as though it should work, but it's not. Can anyone shed some light? - Jonathan