Hah! Thanks for all of the Firefox follow-ups. I had stumbled across the info about fonts shortly after I posted.
While printing from FF didn't work, using good old fashioned "lp" from the command line worked on the filled-and-saved PDF. I also tried moving pdfs back and forth between my home computers (stable) and work computers (essentially close to testing) with strange results as well. mrc Ooops... forgot to send this draft yesterday ....
