You do not need programming skills, just a fair amount of Drupal experience and some time. There are a large number of older bug reports marked CVS that have not been closed out over time ago and may no longer be relevant. Here are the steps:

1. Download and install Drupal HEAD on a test site.
2. Visit the pending bugs list and start with the oldest reports.
3. If a bug is marked as 4.5 or cvs, check if it still applies to the current HEAD version you downloaded.
   • if it still applies, then set the version to cvs (if there is more than one cvs in the version menu, pick the first)
   • Click the follow up link and update the bug report with your findings so that work is not duplicated.
   • if the bug can no longer be reproduced as it is fixed or just no longer applies (several screens are reworked in HEAD), just change the status to fixed and update the comments acordingly.
4. If bug report version is marked as 4.6, then just follow up whether the bug still exists in HEAD and update accordingly with a comment "exists in current HEAD". If you feel like verifiying if the bug has been corrected in 4.6.2 then go ahead but the current focus is to clean up the oldest ones first.

When Drupal enters the feature freeze cycle, it'll be much, much easier to look at only the real bugs not at several hundreds of old bugs. This is an excellent way to get involved with QA testing and is something that really helps out.

NOTE: No, there is no date on a feature freeze, we'd just like to get the clean up done so we are ready when it's announced.

Update: 357 open bugs on July 27 07:12 GMT+1. I will update this post from time to time to indicate where we are.
Update: 284 open bugs on August 23 18:05 GMT+1. I guess the bug bingo moved people. It's improvement, no doubt, but still a lot.