I think I may have found the problem. It looks like it's getting permission denied when trying to read the fonts files because the arf/tar file has the permissions on those files 0600. (Unfortunately, I can't verify that that's the problem, as I'm not at home right now.)

Is there any reason they need to be set that way? The whole share is ro anyway. And there aren't really any users on the Receiver OS, anyway, are there?

BTW, a couple of finds produce these outputs:

% find . \! -perm -0040
./empeg/lib/fonts/graphics.bf
./empeg/lib/fonts/large.bf
./empeg/lib/fonts/medium.bf
./empeg/lib/fonts/small.bf
./empeg/lib/fonts/wait.bf
./empeg/lib/fonts/timecode.bf

% find . \! -perm -0004
./dev/mem
./dev/kmem
./dev/ttyS0
./dev/ttyS1
./empeg/lib/fonts/graphics.bf
./empeg/lib/fonts/large.bf
./empeg/lib/fonts/medium.bf
./empeg/lib/fonts/small.bf
./empeg/lib/fonts/wait.bf
./empeg/lib/fonts/timecode.bf