I have a 17" samsung with a native resolution of 1280 x 1024, and whoever said it looks bad when its at a different resolution either has a crappy monitor, or theyre retarded. Just make sure when your buying an lcd that hte response time is UNDER 12ms or else you'l start to notice some ghosting on dark games/websites. Mine is 8ms and I never really get any ghosting that I can notice.
Go with LCD all the way. Its new technology, very small and compact, its going to be replacing crt's. Like 90% of the time newer lcd's are clearer than crt's. It may be a bit more expensive, but its definately worth it.
I used to have a 21" crt and i replaced it with 17" lcd. Thats 4 inches I lost in screen size, and I'm glad I got this.