One thing I am going to post on my dev blog is how to have WP connect to the DB only once per client on custom installations like COLOURlovers.

On CL I pull in a global include file that is used by every script on the server [including WP] which sets up the environment and connects to the DB ... then WP also connects for it's purposes ... since they're both reading from the same DB, why not share the Connection Resource since there's no need for 2 DB connection per client [unless we're talking about replication methods] ....... any who, I am planning on writing that soon and will post a link here :-)

Looking forward to reading about this :)

Allllll righty, found some time to throw this together ... pureform.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/use-one-db-connection-on-your-custom-wordpress-install/

That's a nice hack. I left a comment on your blog about a possible improvement :)