I had a new customer using our software, and they had just purchased 6 new Dell Vostro 1720 laptops with Windows XP preinstalled. Technically, the software was working fine. No matter what the screen resolution and Font size was set to, it always used large fonts.
We use the Farpoint Spread control throughout the application, and it internally was using this large font size to calculate the width of columns, which was throwing the layout off.

After much googling, I found a reference that said Dell customize the windows desktop to use the larger than normal fonts and other extra large windows desktop settings. When looking within windows display, appearance and advanced, they all showed normal. A couple of hours of more googling, I found how to go into the registry and change these.

Setting these two values in the registry to 60 did it...it did require a reboot afterward.

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Hardware Profiles\Current\Software\Fonts\LogPixels
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontDPI\LogPixels

Just thought I'd share this.

Kirk