LW Pro connects to 5 Ultrapeers & LW Basic to 3. If you are an ultrapeer you connect to more people. Likewise if you are uploading you are able to connect to more people (not visibly) indirectly which is why you can get better search & downld results. Depending on what you are sharing & the people uploading, you may find you connect to different types of people. eg: changing the material that's shared can allow you to connect with diferent sets of people for different types of search results. That's speaking from my experience anyway. Murasame is good at advice for setting up for optimising your performance. See http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...threadid=27036

It sounds to me from your question you may also have detected that different types of shared files can result in different types of connections as I suggested.

As far as waiting in a line for a downld ... well that should be democratic ... 1st in line, etc. But there are some rogue parasitic Gnutella clients out there. I won't name them ... but these have been known for jumping queues & pushing others out of the waiting list. Yuk! When I see those in my upload list (monitor window) queuing up & I see they've pushed others out then I cancel them ... even though they return & repeat ... I'm not about to give them 1st spot when they behave like that. There are a way of blocking them but I'm yet to do that.