Actually I found a really interesting thing as I was playing with stored MAC addresses. I had thought the sticker on the Ethernet Shield was a method of the manufacturers to distribute shields without actually having to burn unique MAC addresses on individual shields. I thought that by putting the MAC address from the sticker into the sketch, that value would get loaded on boot. It turns out the shield ignores the sketch values and uses the burned in values. (Checked by looking at the stats from my ASUS router). My need for loading a unique MAC address is not required since the sheild manufacturers are sending out product ready to go.
I'm not sure if this has always been the case. I assume not since the sketch command allows for MAC entries to be added. Maybe there is a way to force the MAC values from the sketch, but for my purposes if the shields are coming preloaded, I don't need to do this.
Thanks for everyones input.