Dan, welcome back! I'm thrilled to hear that you will be picking this project back up.There is a big need for a multizone audio solution where we are not required to spend thousands of dollars and hire a custom installer to install a solutoin. Here's a short list of things I would like to see with the program:
-M-zone on a single computer with a multichannel audio card, or multiple cards
-Integration with russound, niles or other onwall keypads
Here's a
link to another forum where someone has created a solution to use a russound system to control J Rivers Media Center v11 and it's multizone abilities. This appears to be a very robust and simple solution for multi zone audio in the HTPC realm. If there were a way to translate this to MCE or create a GUI that controlled the J River solution.
Glad you're back!