You wrote (in your message from  4)
 > 
 > Does anyone know, is the anti-aliased hack somehow dependent on direct
 > hardware support?  I would have assumed not, but I'm starting to
 > wonder.  Is there something non-obvious I need to do to get xterm to
 > have "fuzzy font"?
 > 

It depends on 2 things:
- having X render support in the card driver. I think most of the
  drivers in 4.0.2 have it, but not all. 
- intalling FreeType2 and rebuilding the server with FreeType2 support
  enabled. This is explained in the Release notes: 
  <http://www.xfree86.org/4.0.2/RELNOTES4.html#21>

-- 
					Matthieu