Affliate Links, PR, Redirects and Penalties

I want the affiliate links to my site to pass PR, but I'm afraid of penalty

[pokerjoker]

I have a large site which is a little over 2 years old and has over 10,000 inbound links from affiliates.

The affiliate links look like this:

www.example.com/?aff=MCXQDFADFA
www.example.com/some-url.php?aff=MCXQDFADFA

For various reasons, I've disallowed Googlebot to index these links in robots.txt.

I have long debated whether or not to try to get PR value from these links by 301 redirecting all affiliate links to their "true" pages (the url above with the querystring params stripped). This approach is discussed here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Aside from ethical considerations, my major concern is that using this approach may incur a penalty for suddenly acquiring 10,000+ links overnight (if the redirects are implemented). I have noticed that one of my competitors uses the redirect approach, and currently holds the top rank for many extremely competitive terms.

My questions:
1. Will implementing these redirects incur a penalty for too many links, too fast?
2. If so, is there any way to slowly implement the redirects (perhaps using the affiliate ID)?

Your help is much appreciated.

[freewebsiteideas]

You could write some code to only redirect if there referer is sites A, B, or C...