I have put together a new basic networking library, which i think is easy to use. It currently only works using tcp. But wraps some stuff nicely (i think). It ‘may’ also fix the problem, lots of ppl have been reporting that lags occur with panda3d networking (but i could not test that, search for DISABLE_NAGLE_ALGORITHM in the code)
to pickle/unpickle data i use http://oregonstate.edu/~barnesc/python/rencode.py which seems to have less security holes then the ‘normal’ pickle.
the client can also build up multiple connections to different servers, so it might be a start for a peered network.
i only did little testing, so bugs might still be in the code. If you find a bug please post it, also if you find it useful and everything works fine, a post would be nice 
changes:
06.10.07: added some udp features
06.10.07: added basic udp code and udp broadcasting
05.10.07: fixed a bug in the client-to-server connection
04.10.07: initial upload
download latest version:
http://public.nouser.org/~rspoerri/Development/python/panda3d/projects/network-code/net-code-v2.1.1.zip