I've done some searching and I've not been able to find anything (maybe I'm searching for the wrong thing)
My idea is to hook up an arduino to my home network (in a way not decided yet) and then send data to it from a PC using VSPE to allow the arduino to display information on an LCD screen, news feeds, weather, server runtime statistics, etc
Anyone ever tried something like this? if not I will continue playing around with some ideas until I find something I am comfortable with 
Does this serial module look like what you had in mind?
WOW!! I've got one of those I think in a server I bought for £40 its worth more than the server LOL
I think it would do the job, but also maybe a bit over the price range I had in mind. Pretty smart piece of kit though
Maybe something like LCD Smartie http://lcdsmartie.sourceforge.net/ That is not the same, what you want to do, but near to your idea!
You need a USB/Serial LCD and the program is free.
Absolutely electrosys, I was planning on using something like LCD Smartie and from looking around possibly something like VSPE (Virtual Serial Port Emulator) to send the traffic that would normally go to a serial port
It kind of depends on which one would work best I suppose, I then need to somehow get that signal back from the network to the arduino and out to an LCD
Hooking up the LCD seems to be dead simple from looking at lots of online guides.
Going from the ethernet to the Arduino seems to be the harder part (I think) there is a great guide on instructables for a credit card sized ethernet arduino though that I found the other day which is looking promising
Of course, you don't need to use Ethernet at all.
If you have a router that supports SLIP, and many routers that can run OpenWRT or similar do, then you can establish a network connection over a serial cable to your router.
Of course, this relies on you adding a serial port to your router, but could be a very cheap way to do it.
It is fairly easy to receive data using an ethernet shield. You could make a web page with a text box on it where something is typed in, a send button is clicked, and the ethernet shield receives what is sent.