Extremely bright iMac display with Washed-out colors

I recently purchased a 20" iMac and am having problems with the display. The colors are extremely washed-out and faded even at the lowest brightness settings. Although recalibrating helps, I have been unable to get acceptable color by doing so, and the only way I have found to reduce the brightness of the whites is to use a third party utility that reduces the brightness below Apple's default specs, but at the cost of making everything else darker.I have been unable to find an acceptable balance where the colors look reasonably accurate for home use.I would have preferred to get a refund on this machine, but I bought it from an Apple reseller which has a no-refund policy on Apple products.
Has anybody managed to find a workaround for this issue or has a custom calibration that works reasonably well to address it? Also, is there any way to disable the iMac's internal display so that I can hook it up to an external CRT and just use that? If not, I am wondering if using an external display will degrade the graphics performance overall, as the card is powering two displays.If not I would be happy just to do that for now. Because of the glare coming off the screen and inability to control the brightness, I am finding it extremely difficult to use this display. Does anybody know of an anti-glare screen for the iMac or any tips on reducing glare, as it is a serious issue for me.

Well I run a program DarkAdapted http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/12134 to correct the brightness of whites, it even improves the viewing angle a lot, color shifts are almost non-existant.
Shades works just as well, but eats a bit more CPU.
http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/shades
A warning though when using Shades: you can darken the screen with it to a level you no longer can control the desktop/system, so I recommend you to memorize the short key to quit Shades, I think it is Command-Enter, so if you accidentily dim the screen just to see how far you can go (like I did) you don't have to panic

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