shininess looks inherently bad unless you have a very smooth object
That is why I like to use reflection maps as fake lighting. The result is much smoother than the vertex-dependent lighting you get with the scene lights.
Oh, and Mustang, since I see you are reading this thread, and are probably one of the more qualified people around here to answer, do you know of any other methods for doing the specular? Have you seen any issues with the object duplication trick? Like I said before, it works fine here, but I'm a bit concerned about z-buffer issues on some cards.