I'd suggest the following patch as an easy way to tell that something in wineconsole is going wrong. All I was getting was that the backend had failed - no indication of why.
--Dante
--- user.c Tue Jul 23 09:29:23 2002 +++ newuser.c Tue Jul 23 09:29:54 2002 @@ -550,7 +550,7 @@ fc.data = data; fc.done = 0; EnumFontFamilies(PRIVATE(data)->hMemDC, NULL, get_first_font_enum, (LPARAM)&fc); - if (!fc.done) WINE_WARN("Couldn't find a decent font, aborting\n"); + if (!fc.done) WINE_ERR("Couldn't find a decent font, aborting\n"); return fc.done; }