Thanks for not making me feel that alone out here - re-reading my post, the idea of using jabber for this kinda stuff somehow sounded a bit silly in this supposedly golden age of all these weird ways to communicate between machines (SOAP, web services (same thing?), all those RPC modules, ftp, email, etc.).
Thanks for that pointer - i somehow foolishly assumed that the clients could buffer messages for delivery, too, and thus stand corrected (and whith a sh!tload of more work to do :-).
didn't know about jabberd2, thanks for that, too...