Dell Display Driver Update 
The flickering display on the laptop was corrected by going to the Dell support page and downloading the latest XP display drivers. One feature that this set of drivers has is the ability to adjust the 'brightness' factor; messing with this cleaned up the colors and stopped the flicker. Much nicer.
It also adds the multi-monitor wide-screen setup, however it will only do two monitors at 800x600, and honestly there just isn't any point to that.
The current replacement specs are the Lattitute D600, so we can only hope for the future.