UPDATE: I discovered the problem. It was the NVidia drivers for my 8600 GT. Previous drivers were 78.13 (7813). New drivers are 82.50 (8250). Running Vista x64 with .NET 3.5 SP1
On Vista, witness the nastiness:
On XP, the kind of quality we've come to expect:
I can't puzzle it out. Incredibly odd that I can't find any mention of this on the WWW.