I have a quick question about the connect=x.x.x.x option - what exactly does it do? I understand that it "points" a certain bitcoin client to another PC on the LAN, but what does this mean for the bitcoin application itself? Does all coin generation funnel to the wallet that is held on the target PC? Or does a client that is pointed to another local PC just funnel its connections through port 8333 on that PC, and still manage its own wallet?
Just curious.

It acts as a bridge for the other computers. When you only have one IP address, you can technically only forward your connection to a single computer (on port 8333) so the other computers on your network that are running BitCoin won't be able to accept inbound connections from others.
From what I've seen, you have one computer that kind of acts like a server. The other computers on your network connect to it and thus can download all the blocks more quickly to begin processing. The difference is, instead of one computer acting alone to generate coins or process blocks, you now have *other* computers doing part of the work for it and report the results back to it.
I haven't run this long enough to see what effect is has, I'll report back here when I do. My guess is that all the coin generation is funneled back to the "main" computer that all the clients connect to. So, while each client may not get a piece of coin generation, there is no reason why you can't transfer coin around to the clients after they are generated at the main computer (since you have control/access to all of them anyway).
It may take a while, but when I do see some results, I'll post it here because I'm curious myself.
