The few past Blender releases have boasted some improved bump settings in the texture influence panel:

However, setting the Best Quality bump mapping for a material that gets reflected results in weird artifacts in the reflected image.

I was getting really upset not finding the source of the artifacts in the reflected wood panelling, then I tracked it to the bump settings:

The other options seem to work fine, I finally went for “original” mostly for the name than observing any real difference 🙂

(test done in Blender 2.58)

Update on January 04 2012 – Blender 2.61 (different scene) looks like only “original” bump method gets a clean reflection.. some times… Note: “original” inverts the bump (is that why it is called original??)