a couple things i think are true:
1) The text isn't rendering because i'm only trying to render one column from each character and advancing by one column. in certain situations, the text is rendered by gdi to copy as images and that works fine. this is probably a problem related to interpretation of the major axis/width register.
2) Much of the icon and image rendering in the installer is wrong because i'm supposed to simultaneously scale. Need to peek and see which registers control that.