I dropped the font, didn't realize it was so bad until somebody emailed me. Saw a screenshot, yikes.

I've noticed this with my own websites. Fonts consistently look great in FF and IE but terrible in Chrome. What can be done to fix this?

Turn of the DPI scaling in Windows.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2900023

Google around for the actual steps.

I'd rather not do a fix like that; I want to notice if sites I code have the issue.

I agree, but until Google gets the fix in you can have no way of knowing what it will look like because it all depends on the hardware and how it has been scaled.

I only came across this because my daughter's new laptop with an HD screen made Chrome look awful and I didn't understand why since it looked good everywhere else.

Use Firefox? Chrome has bad font rendering consistently, it's nothing you've done.

Try increasing font size to 110% in this case.

yep, i kept reading, but the font made it painfull