Text dissappear - cannot force forground color to black in imagettftext()

I moved my Drupal site from one hosting company to another - and textimage.module stopped working.

I've tracked the problem down to the function imagettftext(). If you force the foreground color to black via:
$foreground = imagecolorallocate($im, 0,0,0);

the text will appear, but it is pale yellow. Nothing I do seems to make the color choice for imagettftext() work properly.

Checking phpinfo() - both hosts support FreeType. But...

the difference between the two hosts look to be how the linkage is accomplished:
Host that works:
FreeType Linkage "with freetype"

Host that doesn't work:
FreeType Linkage "with TTF library"

Any suggestions on how to proceed? Does anyone else have similar experience?

Thanks,

Jason