There is a probem that I and others in my area are running in to. I am a student at IU and like almost half the other students live off campus. Most people have either cable or xdsl connection being shared by roomates. People seem to favor using some old PC they keep running in a closet to share the connection with all their roomates. The cable and dsl service around here doesn't come close to meeing specs either. I started to look for wasy to optimize our bandwidth when I thought of something. A sort-of proxy server for gnutella clients.
Heres a rough idea:

A 'server' would be setup and started on the computer that shares the net connection. Preferably it can operate in unattended mode since this machine will most be likely... unattended.
Specialized clients on the individual computers interface with the server and access the gnutella network via the server.
All incomming and outgoing searches and file requests are handled by the server.

I'll leave it to pros to make the call, but I think it would help the end-users as well as the network in general. Outside clients would see a 'gnutella server' as just another single client even though it is a unifying frontend for the 2 or 3 or 4 roomates computers hooked up on a home network.
This would help the network because these pseudo-servers would be up all the time further increasing stability.
Outside clients would benifit because this method could operate much more transparently. Shares would be setup on and controlled by the server; all you need to do is use samba (or simmilar protocol) to allow the server to access the other computers files on the LAN.

Whatever, I think you might get my point now.
Feedback?

PS: I would jump all over this, except the only laguage I know in and out is VB which wouldn't be the most desirable one for something liek this. I am just proposing a theory and seeing if anyone has some opinions.