(well, maybe not that surprising)
It appears that the more bandwidth a search engine spider sucks away, the lower the ranking of the business site I maintain. Checking awstats at mid-month, I place the following results along with the SERP of a single, targeted keyword:

Googlebot
3.32 MB
Page 1

Yahoo Slurp
17.16 MB
Page 5

MSNBot
34.83 MB
Page 10

Almost 35 MBs in 15 days and I have restricted MSNBot to 300 second intervals. Perhaps I should keep choking it until the placement improves