I second CDex.

I have Rockbox on my 1st gen 1 GB nano. Several things drew me to it:

If you'd prefer not to alter each of your mp3 files, I use Rockbox on my 1st gen iPod nano and there's a pitch control that will allow me to speed up playback up to 2x.

craig: let me see if I get this straight: if you transcode from a higher bit rate to a lower one, you'll notice a drop if audio quality. Wow. I think you're trying to be helpful, but thanks for stating the rather obvious.

Narsil, it's not permanent at all. They've created a nice installation program over at the site. You run it, choose the options you want (including optionally creating a system restore point - always a good idea), then install away.

phantomdata, Ubuntu is just as yummy.

MediaMonkey does not support multiple libraries yet. That feature is planned for the next major release. However, since the MM database is simply an mdb file, you can write a simple batch file (there's one in the MM forums) to switch between 2 libraries. I use it to switch between my mp3 and ogg libraries.

Instead of sticking people with Aero, let's just have M$ft push this out as an update to XP: http://osx.portraitofakite.com/

Vista is being pushed because Microsoft needs to release operating systems periodically to generate revenue. All this Aero nonsense is simply a nice face on top of what previous Windows versions should have been.

Just to be clear, the list contains open source AND freeware apps (many of which are not open source like Picasa).

Lots of interesting and complicated-sounding solutions. Perhaps they are best, but the first thing that immediately came to mind was installing and using an alternate protcol for use on the private net.