OK Darklord, I hear you but I don't experience the same problems as you do - excepting 1, which is the incomplete file syndrome but I think I have worked that one out.

You and I both live in Europe, our times zones are different to the bulk of the users who I suspect are NOT in Europe. This all seems 'woolly' but I did some experiments over the past few days just to check 'the score' and here are the conclusions I have drawn.

1) If you leave you system running all the time (and especially when you go bed and dream nice dreams) you will get your files - I have only one file which hasn't made it in 7 days and that one is a 512 megs iso and the amount of users with it is very low.

2) I put the reason for this down to users system power management. Let me explain.

I am on 4 user LAN running under win2k and a compaq dual p3 dedicated win2k server- all 1.4 tb all with 60gbx2 raid arrays and we have a dsl link (not shared at exchange) with typical u'dl speeds of in excess of 100k/s to our mother (remote) server per user. This could be faster per user but I have it throttled back as sometimes we have to do real work:-)

I have some unique mp3 files on one of the computers which has xolox running on it 24/7. However. even though I could find the file entry on xolox search, I could not access the files even after a wait of 3-4 hours.

My initial thoughts were that xolox had 'broken' again on that computer so I went up to check it, and it was running fine. I obviously 'woke the machine up' and by the time I came back to my own computer the downloads were completed (this was about 10 minutes later as I had made coffee and took a pipi).

My conclusions are that as most of the users in the world use power management of some description this could be the first problem, even if they keep their systems on all day/night; the second being that America and the F/East sleeps a lot while Europe is awake and people are reluctant to leave their systems running overnight which will reduce the opportunity of succesful hits/surpluses.

Ver 1.1 (or whatever the last one was) was in fact stabilised for me when I took off power management on my own computer. Before that it wobbled all over the place, hung the machine, did all sorts of unexpected things.

Since I have been on the night shift here (3 days now) I have a successful and complete 3.5 gb of downloads and as I don't do much work here overnight I have had a chance to play around with it all and I have found it pretty solid, under last release and this new one.

My suggestion is to keep trying with it , turn of your own power management and encourage others to do the same and don't close the program down at all whilst you need files to get completed.

By the way - has anyone else done any experiments with xolox? Post it and tell me what you have found.

I still rate xolox as the best p2p program I have (and I have them all)

Jude