So, imagine you are running a bandwidth-conscience site (such as through Bluehost, where if you go over the quota the site goes "down" for the rest of the hour -- let alone a free host that shuts you down for the month when you hit the limit.)

If I have multiple sections of a site that use different style elements, is it more bandwidth-friendly to ingrain small sections of a style sheet into a page,
or is it better to always refer to a main stylesheet location, basically loading
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="(style sheet for the entire site).css" />

Imagine in this scenario if my main or global stylesheet uses 20 or so different parameters, but a single site section might only take 3 or 4.

Any thoughts on which is nicer for bandwidth?

Well I would think the link to a separate file is the best, but only if you have a lot of pages that use that file. That way browsers can cache the file and they won't have to download it for a while. Embedding the code requires the browser to download more, while linking to an external file can be cached easier.

D'oh - I didn't think about the power of caching.

You're right, that a cached page or file would not be loading up over and over again. It would refer to the browser's cache.

That answers that, I figure.