[XeTeX] Trouble with a Hello World document

[Easter Sunshine]

Hi, xelatex has been producing 0-byte pdf's for me
without any indication of why, but only on certain
inputs. This document does not compile:

%&program=xelatex
%&encoding=UTF-8 Unicode

\documentclass{article}

%\usepackage{fontspec}
%\setromanfont{Verdana}
\font\V="Verdana" at 12pt

\begin{document}

\V Hello.

\end{document}

The console output is:

unity at queensvillage ~/Misc $ xelatex hello.tex
This is XeTeX, Version 3.141592-2.2-0.995 (Web2C
7.5.5)
entering extended mode
(./hello.tex
LaTeX2e <2003/12/01>
Babel <v3.8d> and hyphenation patterns for american,
french, german, ngerman, b
ahasa, basque, bulgarian, catalan, croatian, czech,
danish, dutch, esperanto, e
stonian, finnish, greek, icelandic, irish, italian,
latin, norsk, polish, portu
ges, romanian, slovak, slovene, spanish, swedish,
turkish, ukrainian, nohyphena
tion, loaded.
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2004/02/16 v1.4f Standard
LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(./hello.aux) [1] (./hello.aux) )

stdin -> hello.pdf
[1Output written on hello.pdf (1 page).
Transcript written on hello.log.

And I have a 0-byte pdf file. If I erase the \V, it
compiles as expected and produces this output:

stdin -> hello.pdf
[1]
2552 bytes written
Output written on hello.pdf (1 page).
Transcript written on hello.log.

What am I doing wrong?

(I am on x86 Gentoo and there is no easily-obtainable
ebuild for newer versions of XeTeX.)

Attached is the log file for the FAILED compilaton.

Thank you for your time.


       
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