glengara - 10:45 am on Nov 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

*Or any evidence to suggest that linking in this way could be damaging to us?*

As described, and on a stand-alone basis, I would doubt it.

*incoming links are much more beneficial from different IP ranges*

Apart from the accepted wisdom that incoming links are worth more than internal ones, the only possible benefit would be a smaller chance of the links being seen as "affiliated" as per the Hilltop/LocalRank computations.

That's somewhere down the line though, and would probably also depend on the overall linkage pattern.