I didn't see any feedback past my comment.
However - in xterm around the same point,
I made changes to allow it to run with "fixed"
as a fallback.  The underlying problem was
"reorganization" of fonts in xorg, which caused
lots of havoc in various X applications.  They're
still present, but moved to other packages.

Unlike xterm, xvile doesn't at the moment support
Xft, so it's really dependent on these fonts.
A fallback to "fixed" seems less friendly than
advising people to install the fonts (in whatever
package they're moved to in the upstream shell game).