extending arduino digital outputs

Its probably too late, since you said you only have 2 days left, but I've had good luck with the M5451 chip, which does 35 constant current switches each. Each chip can handle 1 watt total so that sounds like it might meet your power requirements. Actually, you could probably put a heat sink on the chip to drive it even higher :-).

See my blog:

and also a conversation in exhibition:
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1235795499