John Nice wrote:

I have noticed that characters along a line of text exhibit bands of
higher and lower density. It seems to affect all sorts of screens,
system, Word, Thunderbird, you name it. I have tried running
ClearText (or ClearType) which has improved things a lot, ...

PC is a Lenovo core7 with 12 GB. Monitor is an Acer 17-inch running
1280x1024

What is the *native* resolution of the screen? Use that. Anything else
results in artifacts in the display (tinging, less focus, etc) due to
interpolation required across multiple pixels. This does not apply to
CRT monitors (which would have a different cause for banding).

You may have masked some of the non-native resolution artifacts by using
Cleartype. By setting ClearType to use a fuzzier interpolation, the
artifacts may be less visible.

"Acer 17-inch" doesn't identify the actual monitor. That means you will
have to read its documentation to determine what is the native
resolution for your monitor (if it is not a CRT monitor).

On LCD monitors, use their native resolution. Even if everything looks
smaller because you bought a larger monitor, you should use the native
resolution. Larger monitors often result in smaller text because the
DPI setting in Windows is still used at that smaller resolution of the
larger screen. The same number of pixels get used so smaller pixels
(for larger screens) means smaller text. You can up the DPI to make
text more legible. Long ago I changed the default DPI (96) to 125.
This made the text much easier to read; however, although Microsoft
published DPI documentation on how applications should handle different
DPI settings, still only a few programs are DPI-aware. The result is
that you may see truncated or out-of-dialog-window text. I had one app
that opened huge (was fixed) to fill almost the entire screen and I
couldn't get at the title bar to move the window up to get at the text
at the bottom. The author didn't bother to make his program DPI aware
but instead move the buttons from the bottom to the top of his window.