Yet again Zeldman points to a great resource: Microsoft’s ClearType which is a method of sub-pixel rendering/anti-aliasing for fonts on Windows XP. I decided to play with it and was pleasently surprised by the improvement made across all of my applications. Text is much easier to read as it renders much like the anti-aliased text in Photoshop and other graphics tools.
If you run XP, you should check out ClearType Setup on the MS Web site, which walks you through the simple process of enabling it.