although I lost my original capture, I 've been playing around with the MSU sharpen and denoise filters on my original empire capture and what I have found is that
a) MSU filters are bloody slow. my works 1.7athlon is only yielding 1 or 2 fps when either of these filters is present. with any other sharpen filter I am getting 14fps so that's a massive hit. based on that it will take my system 49 hours to give me an interim file which is ludicrous.
b) the MSU sharpen filter, while pretty good, introduces a certain amount of mosquito noise to the source.
in comparison if I use unsharpmask.vdf under virtualdub I get nearly as good a sharpness as MSU but with less noise. there is still some, but not as much as MSU.
I find it interesting that you IVTC in virtualdub rather than in script. I found I had field issues whenever I used virtualdubs own. on the other hand, avisynths decomb filter by donald graft has always proven to be very good.
you haven't mentioned it but did you ever manage to eliminate the jaggies? i have them present on my capture but have yet to find a filter that can help on that. some kind of dot crawl thing perhaps? any suggestions?
finally, you seem to be capturing awfully dark? I know this can be adjusted in post but surely you are losing some small bits of detail in the original dim capture? it also explains how it came out a bit dark on your TV. I had this same problem and ended up compensating a bit too far the other way. ie, the blacks were a bit washed out. its tough I know and usually involves a few passes before you hit the right mix to suit.