qt4 bad font hinting (antialiasing)

[MustNotSleep]

this happened to me recently, after i hosed my last Feisty setup, that strangely i've never had a problem with in the past.. the first thing i do when installing a new system is performing this procedure to make my Gtk fonts look smooth as eggs.. but Qt4 is a whole 'nother issue...

i noticed the problem first with OpenOffice (2.2.0).. the menus, although somewhat antialiased, still look crappy compared to Gtk's.. but then i saw that it's not just OO, but every app that used Qt4 widgets, and i tend to use a few of them: KeepassX, SMPlayer, etc..

i attach two screenshots so you can see the difference between the way Qt4 looks (qtconfig, OO, KeepassX and SMPlayer) and Gtk (Totem, Gedit)..

i've been a few days with this thing and so far have made 0 progress.. i have tried making a custom ~/fonts.conf file, running fc-cache and emptying my /tmp.. restarting, of course.. nothing...

any ideas? i'm sure i'm not the only one with this.. i have found numerous threads on the intertubes, but no actual solution.. Trolltech has some weird excuse, cleaning their hands of the matter..

btw, strangely enough, qt3 doesn't suffer from this problem.. running qtconfig-qt3 shows perfectly antialiased fonts..

any suggesion is greatly appreciated.. TIA!