I found this when loading and running Telnet, which defines a Font.    
It turns out that there is an implementation of

BDFFontReader class>>#new

	^ self basicNew

This avoids calling BDFFontReader>>#initialize which needs to init a  
properties dictionary.  I added the call to initialize to get the  
code working, but this may not be the best solution.  It may be best  
to remove #new.  I'll leave it to others judgement, but hopefully  
this is enough to be captured as a bug.