You're not going to find something that looks like Lucida and has a wider installation base. But...

There's a free technology called sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) that would allow you to serve a special font to anyone with Flash capabilities.

Fonts have been one of the big problems for designers for many years. Several different application/inserts have been developed, but few of them work consistently at the HTML level. I'd dearly love to see it possible, but so far the best I can come up with (for those pages that SIMPLY MUST HAVE A SPECIFIC FONT) is to provide the font as a download and a short instruction on the page to download and install to see the page in all it's glory.

Tried that for six years. Perhaps three people actually did it. No longer worry about font TYPE/FACE, just the appearance (size, color). The user can all too easily override any font specifications the designer might insert. Not saying it isn't worth the effort, just saying that effort may go for naught.

Addendum... might google "web fonts" for a number of sites that list the most commonly installed Windows fonts. Some of those are scripts which might suit your project.

The only decision that I make on fonts now is if the page should be specifically designed for a serif or sans-serif font and only specify at the level of font family.

hmm i make a website for someone else, so to let them download it is not an option, also i don't know anything about flash.
but it is good if it looks like a handwritten font (because the text is on a background that looks like some paper) and comic sans MS just doesn't look good on it...

IE supports the @font-face CSS rule for fonts encoded using the EOT format. using Micorosoft's WEFT tool, you can create an EOT file out of any TTF or OTF font file that's installed in Windows and allows for embedding in a web document. You post the EOT file on your web server and the font becomes available to anyone using IE.

search: font embedding WEFT - should give you the relevant links

@poppyrich that tool is for windows, i have a mac...

You said the problem was with Windows users, right? Or did I read wrong? If so, then what you see on your Mac isn't the problem.

Anyway, Safari now supports direct linking to TTF files using @font-face. As does FF 3.1Beta.
But be careful of licensing restrictions - there's no hiding it.

no you did read it right ;), but i don't get the TTF files? (it might be because i am not english)
how do i encode fonts?. you said use microsoft WEFT tool, but i can't use that tool to encode fonts on a mac for the windows computers, can i?

No. You have to have access to a Windows machine. That's correct.