Windows takes about 10 minutes to boot.
My computer boots Windows XP Pro in about 1 minute. Anyway, the three minute figure was for DSL upload. It's more like 12+ minutes for a 56K modem (not including cover art).
This is not an issue, because a dial-up modem is too slow to listen to streaming music.
Sorry, but that's not accurate. Quality isn't good, for sure, but you can certainly stream at low bitrates. In addition, cover art will take even more time. At 15KB/s, a 300KB cover art file will take 20 seconds to upload (1 minute if the client is on dial-up).
I think the option (in the client) to not request cover art is a good idea. With a 15KB/s upload limit, I'd rather not saturate my upload stream with cover art when it isn't needed.
An example of software that does this streaming with few issues (except it doesn't yet support APE) is SlimServer. It uses a web interface to select and control song playback (similar to Remote Server), and will allow a person to use just about any client that supports streaming to listen.
Anyway... I take these responses to mean that you are not intending to support low bitrate client connections. =/