I've recently tried piping the output of one free obfuscator into the another free obfuscator - namely Dotfuscator CE and the new Babel obfuscator on CodePlex. More details on my blog.
As for serialization, I've moved that code into a different DLL and included that in the project. I reasoned that there weren't any secrets in there that aren't in the XML anyway, so it didn't need obfuscation. If there is any serious code in those classes, using partial classes in the main assembly should cover it.
