Back to the old domain question...
I have dealt with a couple of old domains that were sat about or not even used, this is just my personal experience but the sites flew up in the SERP's and the site owners haven't looked back since.
I even bought an old domain intospain .com which is 9 years old, I installed joomla on the site and due to not having the time to work on it just left it for a month or two. The last google PR update last week (well it was here in Spain!!! Probably a couple of weeks behind you guys like it always is here!!!) gave it a PR of 2 with no work or anything done to it.
Due to the results with the other couple of sites that I have dealt with lead me to buy the older domain and hopefully when I get the time to work on it I will see some good results.
I didn't know if it was some kind of SEO myth about old domains but it does help.
