Option to consolidate tables

Does anyone know if there is an alternative way to make wordpress use only one set of tables for a multi site blog?

In MU and wordpress 3.x the system creates 8 or 9 new tables for every new blog that is created. We have some older sites using wordpress MU for letting employees create their own blogs (Similar to wordpress.com) and we are at almost 35000 tables now. The tables keep on getting corrupted and crashing MySQL. It seems like it would be easy to add an extra blog_id to the base wordpress tables and everything would work fine?

Has anyone encountered a similar problem before?