I cannot help directly, but two thoughts:
1. my understanding is that Franz will consider tech support questions like this from trial users. Especially since you covered the bases and tried it from C and it worked. If not, maybe they will take the question from me since I am licensed on win32 and they like me because I am always talking them up on c.l.l. :)
2. If this looks like the only problem, two workarounds (as much as I dig FTGL):
a. PortaGlut will use the very limited Glut fonts. That would suck, but at least it gets the thing ported with fonts left as an open item.
b. ImageMagick documentation mentions FreeType support. Not sure how extensive or how efficient this will be, but texture fonts are the fastest and most flexible of even the FTGL fonts, so I think this would be a fine compromise.
Let me get my PortaGlut thing out, then I will do a CelloGlut release (no FTGL or ImageMagick) using just the Glut fonts, then I'll do a CelloMagick add-on, etc etc.
kt