Grayscale font hinting too bleak (Win XP)

Not sure if it is a bug, but when rendering text with `DejaVu Sans Mono` (and pretty much any other font, which is not "crisp") and using grayscale hinting under Windows XP, the letters appear to be lighter and bleaker, than in, say, Netbeans, Notepad++, Firefox, using the same font family, size and color.

At first I thought it has something to do with DPI I use (106 currently), but it appeared not to be the case (besides, the font is rendered of the same size, just lighter).