I see a big difference in graphics quality when I use Radeon software to override application settings and set my own values Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering.  
I did find the culprit this morning though.  It's a setting called "Morphological Filtering".  If I enable it, the text looks terrible.   With MF disabled, its fine.  I think this problem has probably been here all along, i.e. I don't think it was "fixed" at one point only to be broken by a subsequent patch.  More likely it disappeared as a result of me playing with the card's settings and disabling MF.  I go back and forth between higher and lower settings depending whether I'm skinning or playing.
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