font character spacing wonky in Publisher 2007?

I have a font which certain characters are too widely spaced in Publisher
2007. The font works fine in MS Word, and even in MS Pub Word Art, but in a
regular text box, there's a big space between certain characters. The only
way I've been able to make it work is to adjust character spacing with
tracking manually. No fonts are embedded, I checked.

It also worked fine in Publisher 2003, which I'm strongly considering going
back to, since I have a number of existing documents using this font.

(The font is "rhythms" which is a music font for use directly in documents.
It does have unusual spacing for a font, but what in Publisher is changing
that spacing?)