I turned Cleartype off and that helped. The text shadow trick helped as well. I would have thought that using Chrome would mean that Google's fonts would have displayed correctly, but I guess Cleartype overrides that.
I miss the day when testing a website meant using just IE and Netscape -- now I have to turn Cleartype on and off ... ugh
Strangely IE6 (and 7? i think) are OK even with cleartype on.
There is a css hack to get font smoothing on windows:
h1{ text-shadow: 0 0 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.0001); /* Transparent Shadow make some kind of webkit font smoothing kick in */ }