An image demonstrating the problems is at: http://screencast.com/t/bMbVQ2rn
And the sample report is attached.
The fonts are TrueType fonts. In bold, a space before the number 1 vanishes when previewed at 100% (for Arial Narrow) but comes back when increasing the zoom size even slightly.
For another TT font (Gil Sans MT Condensed in bold), the space vanishes even for higher zoom settings.
A discussion of a similar issue at Problem with TTF font in Crystal reports for VS2010 doesn't provide a solution.