I have the entire house wired with 1Gbit, and we have two older laptops. The laptops keep over heating because of over usage. (... and we never seem to leave the house with the laptops)

What I'm planning is to use my server to run our desktop environments and use the laptops as more just dumb terminals. (That brings the processing and temperature down)

I was planning on just using vnc. I know how to forward the sound using pulse audio. But what about USB devices, mainly storage. Is there any way to have the device plugged into the laptop but automagicly mount/forward it to the vnc computer, as if it was a local device? (ie like the -r disk: of rdesktop)

Ultimately I know I could just samba or webdav share the /media directory just wanted to see if there was other options.

Those types of advanced features depend on the specific VNC server you use. There's also FreeNX.

I don't know of anything that allows you to forward USB devices. You may want to look into actually setting up a terminal server http://www.ltsp.org/