Comment 9 for bug 569396

I'm also seeing this problem on 10.04 with all updates applied. It has worked fine in previous versions of Ubuntu.

As a full-time Java developer on linux, I wouldn't classify this as an "annoyance" but as severe. It affects any Java program trying to use monospaced italic fonts. So if you are doing any kind of java UI development, you cannot use Ubuntu 10.04 if you expect it to display correctly.