I'm a web developer with a small college currently evaluating
Sharepoint as an intranet solution and we are very impressed.
However, we are currently renting space on a WSS server and therefore
can't fully evaluate some of the tips as we don't have full admin
access to these sites. We are newer than newborn newbies.

But from my interaction with Sharepoint an subsites so far I was
surprised to find that I cannot create a document library web part in
the root site and share it down to the subsites, or laterally across
subsites. This doesn't seem to fit in with the extensibility I've
heard about and kind of basic to a product like this, so maybe I'm
maybe I'm missing something very basic. Could someone clarify? I'm
going to want to create document folders in one subsite and have them
appear as web parts when I go to design a page.

And don't suggest using web capture as a technique, which I've tried.
It seems to me that Sharepoint in general is slow on this server and
one web capture web part takes 20-30 seconds to render!!