I know I got turned onto the wonderful Vera monospaced font through this list, so I thought folks might be interested that there's an effort to greatly improve Vera.
Vera's an open source font, but is apparently not maintained by Bitstream. So it's been forked as Deja Vu. From glancing at the project's history page, and playing around with it a bit, it seems every bit as good as Vera, and has far better international support -- I noticed less-common diacriticals and Cyrillic glyphs, to start, and it seems there are many more. They are intent on making it a full Unicode font.
More info here:
http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Although most of the installation instructions seem complicated, for us OS X users it's easy: just download the zip file, and add the .ttf fonts to your system.
--John