I think the small font size may be a factor too. Some of the 'yuk' factor of Comic Sans comes from seeing it too many times in poster sizes, usually in a range of colours too, with the large size accentuating the poor letter spacing demonstrated in the article.

Served up small, Comic Sans doesn't have quite the same feel of awfulness.

All of the Microsoft fonts have extremely good hinting, and still look great (well, legible) when shrunk down to tiny pixel sizes. It's the main reason I chose Trebuchet last time I needed a video game font. Though there were a lot of better, more "thematic" choices I could have made, they looked like utter crap at small sizes.