Thank you very much!

I don't want to alter the priority of other transactions (fees & freebies), I just want to guarantee that my own sends are included for free when I successfully generate the block.

I'm curious as to whether or not bitcoind currently has any method for prioritizing its own transactions for picking which transactions to include in the block it is attempting to generate.  I would like to avoid paying the 0.01 fees for new inputs/large transactions, and have the hashing power to do so in what I consider a reasonable time frame.

If it can not, has anybody made a modification bitcoind to do this sort of thing?

I sent a few transactions out recently through bitcoind, and every single one has produced a 0.01 fee, even when the average size of the transactions is 250 bytes (they almost always only had 1 input).

How can I disable the transaction fee when sending smaller amounts?  I'm not that concerned about speed, and I don't like the idea of having a payout of 0.25-0.3 BTC being sent with a 4-5% fee attached.

Spoke too soon!  About 15 minutes after making this post I solved a block with the private pool!

I've been working on setting up a private pool for myself and a few friends (combined we're around 25-30 gHash/sec).  I got pushpool compiled and running, blkmon running to make sure long polling is active and working properly.

I'm testing it on my cluster of computers (~5 gHash/sec).  It's been running a bit over 30 hours now, so on average I would've found something at current difficulty, but I know luck can always screw you over.

My only concern is whether or not pushpool is actually sending/submitting proper work to my GPUs.  They're submitting shares and I've run some calculations based on the share database timestamps (share count during time frame * 2^32, divided by time frame in seconds), which is giving an approximate gHash equal to what I've expected.

Extra info edit:  About 1 in 200 shares submitted to pushpoold are forwarded to bitcoind, log file returns:  PROOF-OF-WORK submitted upstream.  Result: false.  Not sure if that has any additional meaning.

I've got a machine almost built running dual 5870s (was $100-150 cheaper than 1x 5970 for slightly more output).

Does the OS have any effect on the hash rates?  If Linux is faster, would running a GUI linux distro instead of command line have much/any effect?  I'm looking at either Windows 7 x64 or Ubuntu.  I have some spare keys for Windows 7, so the cost of the OS isn't a factor.

UPDATE/EDIT:  If it matters, I may add on a third and/or fourth GPU to the system later.  Running a 1k watt PSU in the rig right now with ample space and airflow.