Thanks, everyone, for your suggestions. I shall try Proteus first, because multiple accounts per service is critical to me (more so than IRC for the mac. I don't necessarily need IRC in the living room).

Now, to answer eliceo:

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Can you let us know what you ended up running resolution wise? Were you able to get 16:9 resolution?

Yes, I am running the native 16:9 resolution of the panel, 1366x768. It works and looks perfect.

The catch is: I tried getting that resolution from the analog VGA connector, and couldn't, even with using a third-party utility to set custom resolutions and refresh rates. The only way I could get the mac to properly feed the TV at its native resolution was to use the digital DVI connection to the TV set. Then everything just worked perfectly with no futzing.

The irony is, the reason I didn't do that in the first place was because I had the Tivo hooked up to the DVI connector. And the Tivo had its own set of problems with the DVI connection that were making me mad. Simply switching the Tivo the component connector solved all THOSE problems too, and the quality is fine. So I killed two birds with one stone by switching the Mac to the DVI connector.

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What type of tv set is this?

I wanted a different one, couldn't get it, and had to settle for a Polaroid 32" flat-panel LCD. I don't remember the model number, but it was only about $1600.00.

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Is there something that can do dvd streaming with menus over SMB ?

I don't know about DVD streaming specifically, but I a) Would just shove the disc in the slot on the front of the mac and up comes the mac DVD player, and b) don't use the mac to watch DVDs anyway because I compared picture quality with the stand-alone DVD player, and I liked the look of the stand-alone DVD player better.

The main thing I discovered was that trying to get certain sorts of media playing in Mac Quicktime was a PITA, so I just gave up and installed MPlayer, and now I'm happy as a clam and can play essentially any video format. I'm sure that there's a player (perhaps even quicktime, the mac DVD player, or Mplayer) that'll play the DVD VOB files directly across the network if that's what you want. I've never tried it, the only media files I play are Divx and Quicktime and such.

Oh, and one other trick:

I couldn't get any sound out of MacMAME. Didn't know why. Turns out that you need to go into the main system control panel and set the MIDI synthesizer sampling rate to 44.1khz instead of 96khz which is the default. Just wanted to put that out there in case anyone else is getting a Mini.