you're right people don't read. i use an amd athlon 64 3000+ 80 gig hd 512m of ram xp2 sp2 a d-link di-604 router and charter cable modem. java 1.5 disabled sp firewall and use mcafee and the one in the router. this is a home net. when i installed lw 4.2.6 had lousy downloads and no uploads. read the faq amd many threads in the forum. what i did after reading all this was to go into the router and give myself a stattic ip changed to port 8346 to keep from conflicting with the other 2 computers on my net. opened up the firewall for that port. then when into xp control panel internet connect properties local area connect tcp/ip properties. and set my static ip. disabled al tcp/ip filtering. enabled net bios over tcp/ip set my static ip in the advanced settings. in connection status manually configured my static ip. in lw i channged to port 8346 forced it and throttled back some on upload bandwidth. then i told mcafee that lw had full access. now people can upload off me. my downloads sometimes smoke and sometimes they crawl. depends on who i hook to i guess. my one problem is that sometimes when i am hooked to 3 or 4 hosts it still downloads at less than 1kpbs. then i can hook to 1 host and get 75kpbs once i get that whipped i'll be a happy camper. overall pretty nice. my point is that if you do your homework and configure all the elements of the puzzle correctly you can make it work. don't just give up after a little while. i'm not a computer geek, just someone who doesn't like to be beat by a machine