Another very simple thing to do is use "?" or "*" characters. A lot of password crackers use these to show the characters of the password that are not yet found. The programme will still find the password but it might confuse a script kiddie a bit.

If you have to go with a lmhash because of backward compatabilty I would suggest that the first and eight charater, at least should be either special charaters of the type "@" "&" or nonprintable as was suggested above.
For the best passwords go with the unprintable characters.