No offence taken.

We have four production distributors two of which are virtual servers.

We put roughly 24 billion transactions through them each day. We have spiked up to 370 billion transactions but this was exceptional.

On the subject of whether this works with SQL2000 distributors the short answer is "I don't know". Some of of publishers are SQL2000 but as the distributors have to be the highest version of SQL that are acting as publishers none of our distributors are SQL2000.