For the most part RDP is OK, but "Ls" and "t's" in certain places get reversed. I thought this may be a problem with rdesktop, the standard RDP client that ships stock with most Linux distros, so I downloaded and built freerdp... with the exact same results. I had a similar issue with rdesktop on Debian r4.0 back when it first came out. Besides the reversed characters, it also had the nasty habit of crashing constantly on any slightly challenging display. Rebuilding it took care of everything on Debian.
Not so on CentOS.
So I'm just living with it. The problem didn't show up in any application until I fired up that PuTTy session above. If during your RDP session you hit Alt-PrintScreen and paste it into MSPaint, the fonts are correct! (The capture above was done in Linux) In fact, if you change the PuTTy font size while in RDP the display gets better. It's still screwed up, but not as much, which is what leads me to believe it's an X issue.
As usual I can find no other human being on the planet with this particular problem.
CentOS being CentOS (highly stable and reliable and therefore not bleeding edge), this issue will probably not go away for a long time.
UPDATE!
I RDP'd to my Windows 7 laptop from CentOS (via rdesktop) for the first time and was surprised to see that the Aero theme wasn't disabled.
I'm not a big fan of Aero (in fact I really couldn't care less), but it is disabled whenever you start a Windows-to-Windows RDP session. A good thing, too, because RDP chokes on heavy graphics. It was pretty sluggish at first, but once all the graphics were cached, it was very usable.
I haven't made up my mind whether it's a bug or a feature.
