After having upgraded to lucid lynx, my fonts started to look all too smooth - subpixel rendering or whatever. The solution is
"Funny i just removed all /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-* and after that "dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig" and Firefox 3.5 started to obey my Gnome text rendering ways. That is all it took."
Well, that helped with firefox etc. But now skype etc. started to look strangely un-aliased. Turns out these are the qt4 applications. Now I installed 'systemsettings' (from kde) and went to Appearance->Fonts. Anti-Aliasing: Enabled, Configure->Hinting Style: Medium.
And for good measure: In Appearance->Style changed the widget style to GTK+