How do you get around the seemingly catch-22 situation of wanting to exchange links with high PR related sites, when you are first starting out and your link exchange page has a 0 PR, and others with a higher PR will only offer to exchange a link if your link page has a similar PR as theirs?
You make yourself a higher PR with other methods than link exchange. Like Directory Submission, Social Bookmarking, Paying for reviews in blogs...
I rarely do any link exchanges, and its not really a great SEO solution. Just build your link profile using the dozens of other one way methods.
The SEs can study link topography, link exchanges REALLY just flag the radar of the link topography algos of Yahoo and Google, beware. Build links through SBs, SN sites and through blog comments, forum postings, etc. The paying through reviews is great too, mrgee. If I could, I'd send you some green rep.
You could purchase a directory which has some decent page rank then put people's links in there. Or you can use an older website with decent rank to link to their sites, then have them link to your newer ones.. Quite often you can just pay them instead of doing a link exchange..