LR4 color management oversaturated colors on a dull laptop

Question

I'm starting to use LR4.1 on a Lenovo T500 Win7 laptop with a miserable LCD panel and with an external wide-gamut IPS Dell U3011.
I used to use Picasa (non-color-managed), and have calibrated both displays with Eye-one display2. Its profile loads upon Win7 startup and corrects laptop colours considerably, while the change on the U3011 is hardly noticeable. I used near-native white point and gamma so that most of the laptop display's limited gamut is used, and I can work on the laptop when necessary with predictable relationship to the U3011 display.
The color-managment of LR is markedly different; I can see it set in when moving the image more than halfway from one display to the other on the extended desktop. It slightly desaturates the U3011, which is good. And it pumps up the colors on the laptop too much: the pale-colored images do get closer, but any vivid colors are blown on the display. I'm quite positive about this because I see the saturation level in the color channel "staircases" of a sRGB test image that set in just over half-way in the R and B channel, only the G channel is relatively unaffected. In Picasa this does not occur to such extent, and the unsaturted colours are a bit more different due to different white point & gamma.
Initially I suspected a faulty calibration, but I saw very similar behavior on a similar hw setup with LR4 but without calibration, where Win7 CM was using manufacturer-supplied color profiles for both displays. I would not like to revert to the standard sRGB display profile in Win7 CM because that'd have a bad effect on non-managed programs.
Is there any way to make color management in LR work like non-color-managed applications? Or to adjust the white point & gamma for the laptop display by LR so that it would become more useful with vivid images (yet less accurate)?

Answer 1

Remember that "calibration" is actually two procesesses: calibration and profiling. 
Calibration brings the monitor to a defined state by correction tables to correct white point and tone response curve.  This information is loaded into the display driver at boot-up, and affects the display for virtually all programs (except a few games and such that bypass the driver). 
Profiling measures (just measures, doesn't adjust) the colour space and other parameters of the monitor, after calibration. Generally colour space can't be altered, only measured.  It is this measurement that goes in the profile.  (Confusingly, the calibration corrections tables are also stored in the profile, despite being nothing to do with the profile!)
Colour management is really about the profile (the profile measurement, not the calibration info).  Colour managed programs (and only colour managed programs) use the monitor profile (and the image profile) to convert the RGB values in the image from the image colour space (e.g. sRGB) to the monitor's colour space (as measured and information stored in the monitor profile). 
So the change you see when the calibration is applied at boot-up is just that - the calibration.  Colour management happens when colour-managed programs display images to the screen.
"The color-managment of LR is markedly different." 
Or rather, LR is colour managed, Picasa isn't. 
"I can see it set in when moving the image more than halfway from one display to the other on the extended desktop. It slightly desaturates the U3011, which is good. And it pumps up the colors on the laptop too much: the pale-colored images do get closer, but any vivid colors are blown on the display."
When you drag an image from one screen to the other, are you using Lightroom (or another colour-managed application)?  In which case you shouldn't see a difference between the two monitors.  If you do, then one or both monitor profiles is probably bad.  If you're using unmanaged applications, then this is what you expect to see. One (or probably both) screens will be displaying incorrect colour.  But each will display different incorrect colour. 
"Is there any way to make color management in LR work like non-color-managed applications? Or to adjust the white point & gamma for the laptop display by LR so that it would become more useful with vivid images (yet less accurate)?"
Colour management in LR is always on.  And in truth, it's a bit pointless trying to make something behave "like non-color-managed applications".  Thing is: non colour managed applications will look different on every monitor.  Different unmanaged applications may look the same on your monitor, but they'll look different on someone else's.  There's no single "look" of non-managed applications. 
The best you can do is export to sRGB for the web.  Most monitors have roughly sRGB colour space, so this is the best guess you can make at the right colour space for unmanaged browsers.  Using an unmanaged colour workflow yourself is simply adding errors in your system to errors in the viewer's unmanaged system.  It's likely to make it worse, not better!