Anyway, I ended up buying a KDS 22 inch widescreen (1.6:1) LCD monitor. I know, "isn't KDS sort of crappy?". Well, I did look at a number of monitors but frankly I was under a time constraint and my wife had a credit at Office Depot to use, so that pretty much limited my options. Once in the store I compared the monitors on display and darn if the KDS didn't look significantly better than the Viewsonics they had, and even better than the HP. Also I wanted a large display and 22 inch was the largest LCD monitor they carried in store. And it had a $50 mail in rebate [;)], so that was that.
Turns out the KDS does look pretty good, and cranked up to the native resolution of 1680x1050 the desktop has loads of room. I tested it with a couple of games. In Forge of Freedom the screen was stretched horizontally a bit and the circles became ovals, but nothing I couldn't deal with. I also tested Civ4, which supports 1680x1050 btw and looks pretty decent as well.
And then the acid test. How well would the half-dozen plus year old graphics look on an LCD? And what about the widescreen effect? Turns out widescreen isn't a problem. I'm sure someone technical can tell you the reason, maybe how it uses DirectX APIs or something like that, but the game screen doesn't get stretched, it just shows more horizontal real estate. Of course at 1680x1050, instead of what I'm sure was the normal in 1996 thereabouts of 800x600, things are a bit small. I played around with the resolutions and found that the monitor settings of 1680x1050, 1440x900 and 1280x768 all displayed the game pretty well. The latter setting gave the best detail, being more "zoomed in", and also made the 2D map the most useful.
Here's a screenie at 1280x768, I had to lower the quality a bit to get it under the 200kbit limit, and of course it loses a lot of detail as a jpg, but you get the idea of what a Campaign Series game looks like in widescreen:
