I have my own distributed computing project, and I am willing to pay for GPU time. If any of you want to make a little extra cash, I pay per month (upfront each month), mostly for Radeon cards since for some reason the NVIDIA cards run my software a lot slower. For newer Radeon cards, the payments are well over the cost of electricity for most people.
Over the course of 8 months, you can actually pay for a Radeon 5770 or 5870, just from running my program (not counting electricity costs).
If you have access to free electricity, this could be a profitable use for your video card when you aren't donating time to charity.
I am in Seattle, and I have an ad on the Seattle Craigslist site: http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/bar/2209064298.html
That ad will expire in a few days, but you can always find my latest ad by searching Craigslist for "5770" or "5870".