Although I rather like what you are suggesting, I think that a designer must not think only about how she uses something but about how
other people use something, right?
Sure, that's why I'm asking around...
What about defaulting to showing both? Then you need not to look anywhere to find it, but you can hide it if you do not use it.
I'd still like to keep the preferences out of this. Both sections take little enough space to be ignorable, and if the ED2k server list can be hidden, it's almost as good as disabling it completely /methinks. My idea would be to Start/Stop networks only in the network pane. All the statistics could be greyed out when a network is disabled, which would enforce the idea even more. Think about it: Currently, when you disable a network in the preferences and then try to connect, it only gives you an error message saying "please enable me". How useful is that really?
The tricky part is how the global connect button should work in this case. It always disconnects all networks, but it should only connect the network(s) you have manually started before. That needs to be made obvious somehow.
