Yes, I'd be interested to hear about this too.

FWIW, here is a somewhat related, recent experience we've had:

During May/June this year we created a freeware app (for Win), made it available for download via our website and then used an auto-submitter to submit it (the PAD file) to a few hundred shareware/freeware download sites (in the hope of both - getting downloads and some link-love for SEO).

The App got listed on a good number of sites (with many linking to our site) and we've been receiving a decent number of downloads, but all those links appear to have done nothing as far as Google rankings are concerned.