Continual new games from the shell works fine, no degradation of performance. Had several strat games in a row, all worked fine without going to the desktop. Maybe it would anyway, dunno, I have 768mb RAM, but it's useful to be able to do this.
I'v had a gig of ram for a year and I could not host multi in a row before. I would guess at least 3 dozen fixes over time, mainly cleaning up memory after the game was over, were made in an attemp to get multi games to work.
I've always found that the time between games (remaking) is good to stand up, go to the kitchen and grab me some tea before the next game =) but then again, that's just me... kinda hard to sit there for hours and hours playing a game after game without stopping.