The first problem is that immediately after launching the game you'll probably notice the gamma for your whole desktop changes. Unfortunately there's no way to tell it not to do that. Essentially, you'll want to change the gamma to match your default desktop setting. I have an ATI card so my settings are configured in Catalyst Control Center. I can reset to the Catalyst color profile, then move the gamma slider in game and see what ends up matching. You're mileage may vary, just pick whatever's least uncomfortable.

Maximized Fullscreen

Borderless windowed mode is ideal for people with multiple screens - and also just about everyone else too. Window resizing must be disabled first, otherwise the mouse will be offset incorrectly. You can find this setting in game under:

Options > Display > Allow window resizing

Or in eqclient.ini:

AllowResize=0

Now the window borders can be properly removed by a third party utility such as this autohotkey script:

    ^!h::
    IfWinExist EverQuest
    {
       WinSet, Style, -0xC00000 ; hide title bar
       WinSet, Style, -0x40000 ; hide thickframe/sizebox
       WinMove, , , 0, 0, 1920, 1080
    }
    return

Also, a couple of settings in eqclient.ini that will be of interest:

MaxFPS=150
MaxBGFPS=9

Controls

The next culprit is mouselook sensitivity. Camera controls using the keyboard are reasonably tight, but by default mouselook is a miserably slow 3%. This is easily remedied under mouse options.

Definitely enable "Click Through Self" in General Options. Otherwise you'll have a hard time clicking anything remotely near your character. The target selection isn't quite so advanced.

TODO: Backup keyboard configuration

User Interface

My own ideal interface is as minimal as can be, while providing necessary details for whatever I'm trying to do. That means UI display can and should be personalized to your play style. I strongly recommend exploring what stats and gauges you can display on screen by editing the XML interface files. Frankly I consider this a part and parcel to playing the game and if you're not doing it, you're missing out.

Text colors

Chat colors are stored as separate RGB values in eqclient.ini TextColors section. The default color scheme is a relatively dark palette. I've created an ir_black theme and included it seperately so you can just copy and replace it in eqclient.ini. This is an ideal light text on dark background scheme, so it'll only make sense if you have dark chat windows like I do. I have experimented with gradient backgrounds for chat windows, but the result wasn't great because I could only get 10 levels of transparency from a tga texture ingame.

Reorganize config files

There's over 4.3 thousand files sitting in the root game directory. If that irritates your OCD (or you hate having to look for the same file over and over again), you can reorganize a bit with symlinks. If you're not running the game from an SSD for some reason, this is highly recommended. I don't really do this myself anymore since I can lean on cygwin cli and vim to do any editing.