Blurry text in WPF even with ClearTypeHinting enabled?

How about setting TextOptions.TextFormattingMode to Display as well as RenderOptions.BitmapScalingMode to NearestNeighbor? The latter is new in WPF 3.5 SP1 and I normally use it to remove the blur. :)

<TextBlock Text="Hello world" TextOptions.TextFormattingMode="Display"
           RenderOptions.BitmapScalingMode="NearestNeighbor"
           HorizontalAlignment="Center" TextWrapping="Wrap"
           VerticalAlignment="Center" Foreground="White" FontFamily="Microsoft Sans Serif">
    <TextBlock.Effect>
        <DropShadowEffect ShadowDepth="2" BlurRadius="2" Color="Black"
                          RenderingBias="Quality"/>
    </TextBlock.Effect>
</TextBlock>

Below is how it looks like.

And this is how it looks like in FireFox.

The DropShadowEffect object cannot work with ClearType. This is stated on the MSDN page How to: Create Text with a Shadow:

These shadow effects do not go through the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) text rendering pipeline. As a result, ClearType is disabled when using these effects.

After all, DropShadowEffect is a bitmap effect, not a text effect.

To achieve a similar result without using an effect, you can render the text twice, once slightly offset from the other:

<Grid>
    <TextBlock Text="Here is some sample text" Foreground="Black" Margin="1,1,0,0"/>
    <TextBlock Text="Here is some sample text" Foreground="White"/>
</Grid>

This yields the desired result:

You could also encapsulate this into a control (called ShadowTextBlock, perhaps) so that you don't have to go repeating yourself everywhere.