OK... the font issue is weird. I've added a ton of fonts to my system as well and it all works. I suspect the problem was caused by one or more of the X.org font packages that weren't installed by default. (They were all installed by default in Standard.) Do you know which ones you installed after the fact? Can you provide a list? By comparing your installed list to mine we may be able to narrow this down. It could be just one rather broken package.
Now... on to how to fix X. The error you received comes about when one of two things happens:
1. xfs (the X font server) isn't running
2. the default font path points to something that isn't there
I expect your problem is the latter one. What I *think* happened is that you installed a piece of X.org (a font package) but not all the missing X.org font packages. (You didn't really need Ethiopic script, did you?

) Anyway, that offending package rewrote your default font path and included something that isn't present on your system. Assumung that xfs is running and I'm right about the cause there are three ways to fix this:
1. Install the missing bits that X.org now expects
2. Alter the default font path to match reality on your system
3. Rip out X and reinstall what comes with SOHO and then very carefully add fonts one package at a time.
I recommend #2 as the easiest approach. The defailt font path is defined in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf with additional fonts defined in
/etc/fonts/conf.d By default Vector Linux uses an unusually short font path (just TTF and OTF fonts) while most distros use a rather long one. VL makes up for this by defining anything additional in /etc/fonts/conf.d/51-local.conf. Nothing wrong with this approach, BTW, as it allows VL to exclude fonts that most people won't use, like the aforementioned Ethiopic glyphs.
So... if you look at /etc/fonts/fonts.conf you should see something that looks like this:
<!-- Font directory list -->
<dir>/usr/share/fonts/OTF</dir>
<dir>/usr/share/fonts/TTF</dir>
<dir>~/.fonts</dir>
<!-- Commented out font directories:
These are not indexed by default, as fontconfig then seems
to prefer bitmapped fonts in some cases...
-->
I'd bet your list goes way beyond /usr/share/fonts/TTF and defines a whole bunch more including some you just don't have. This happened when fontconfig regenerated the file above when the evil, borked font package was installed rather than simply rebuilding the font cache. Edit the appropriate section of /etc/fonts.conf to look like what I quoted above and you should be able to start X.
After you get X going again some of your recently installed fonts may be "missing". They're still installed but no longer enabled. That will happen if the offending package overwrote your /etc/fonts/conf.d/51-local.conf file. If that is the case reinstall a package called fontfix from the repository and make sure it replaces all the files.
slapt-get --reinstall fontfix
That will reenable everything.
I'm not one of the devs but I have built some optional (non-X.org) font packages for Vector Linux as well as fontfix.