Ok, I understand better now. ;-)

You might want to look at this...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gift/

It's an open source reverse engineering of the FastTrack protocol (used by Kazaa, Morpehus, etc). You can think of FastTrack as being a sort of second generation Gnutella that's actually solved most of the major weaknesses of the original protocol.

The only problem was, until giFT, it was completely proprietary. Once giFT opened it up, FastTrack actually changed the protocol to shut it out again (and in the process destroyed its server-free independence). However, rather than abandon giFT, the authors decided to create an open parallel protocol. If it gets support and good peers written for it, it could beat Gnutella hands down. For an independent project that doesn't depend on the existing network for files, it would be a much more functional choice.

Gnutella is actually moving in this direction, but it has to fight the demons of backwards compatibility (which giFT is free of). Actually I should point out LimeWire is open source, so spyware or not, you could always fork the code and make a "clean" version (in fact the CVS source tree is spyware free already), but gnutella won't work as well for what you describe. By the time it does (think super-peers), it'll look a lot more like giFT/FastTrack.