europeforvisitors - 4:20 pm on Jun 19, 2004 (gmt 0)

Google may "watch" this sort of thing and manually de-list sites if they feel the links are a result of a SEO and not independent sites who all happened to use the same anchor text in the link, but I am sure there is no automatic process that drops people if they have too many links with the same text.

No, but Google could use a massive number of inbound links with the same anchor text as one factor in a spam-detection process. In other words, if you had 3,000 inbound links on "widgets," that wouldn't be enough to get you penalized, but if you had those links plus high scores for several other possible indicators of "grey hat" or "black hat" SEO, the algorithm could make weighting adjustments that would result in lower rankings on the SERPs.

I have no idea if Google is doing anything like this, but it's a reasonable scenario. Google prefers algorithms to human intervention, and a spam-scoring or spam-weighting process would be comparable to human judgment (which can take many factors into account instead of relying on simple rules).