fot the fonts, this should work. go over to a coworkers windows machine, and search for .ttf files and burn them to cd, when the cd is done burning/*or if you have a network connect, use a little bit of magic to get the files back to the linux machine*/, go take a shower to get the windows scumm off of you, and stick cd in the linux box and copy the .ttf files in a directy, lets say in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF
then tell your xfs server to were those files are, the config file is normaly in /etc/X11/fs/config
restart X and xfs and you should have all the nice windows fonts and that might help/*imho the best part of windows and it did help for somewebsites*/
in addition to that, i normally install all the fonts for X i can
also for icons, i don't know what they were thinking when they designed it that way. but i will try to use more panels and see if the experiance is better