I know you didn't ask me, but you guys help me so much with the HA stuff, I thought I would help out with that which I do know [HT]...
Also, how do you view artist/track info in the various rooms with the cheap receivers? Put PCs at every music location?
Use the server to oversee it all and give you this data. No need for multiple PCs, unless you want in-room control over the source. Even then, you could use that Fujitsu 3400 touchscreen tablet PC for $250 that I got.
I know some folks who are using cheap receivers to distribute CDs via a Delta-410 multi-channel PCI card ($60 off eBay). They put that in their server, split the outputs to the multiple locations, and use their servers to tell them what's on. That way each receiver only has the one input setting, and the server decides what to send them.
You use MainLobby or in my case, CQC, to manage the playback, in which case it knows what's on.
Here's my screen for that, keep in mind that I seperated zones from sources. You can see on this screen what the source is playing, and look on the wrapper for what source is on in which room.
I could just as easily have put this on my "floorplan" view, but if multiple zones are playing the same source it would be visually confusing.