Has anyone ever seen posted a really good comparison of the various gnutella clients? From what I've seen in most forums, how people feel about a certain p2p program is more subjective then objective. And I think this is understandable.

I cut my teeth on Bearshare. I was amazed at all it offered and instantly considered file sharing the next big thing. I thought what a great concept - swapping files anonymously with my fellow man. Soon I was installing a cable modem and checking out other p2p programs. The first thing I noticed was that some programs wanted you to register a login name and pw (ie morpheous). Not very private as far as I'm concerned. [Why don't I ever hear any one complain about this?] The other thing I noticed was that most other p2p user interfaces did not seem to be as robust as Bearshare. Gnucleus seemed to be too quirky. It's easy to get spoiled by Bearshare's features.

Then I tried Xolox. Multiple download over Gnutella? I was skeptical. Then I loaded it and it was even worse. Where were the setup options? Why can't I control uploads? Where are the status bars? And did someone beat up the GUI with an ugly stick or what? But I gave it a shot and what I found was that file download success was drastically increased. How many times did I see a much wanted file get past 90% and then see 'refused' in Bearshare. I feel compelled to believe this is another bearshare guy shutting the pc down or dropping me for whatever reason. In xolox, it just picks up the rest from someone else. Auto-resume really becomes useful in a multi-threaded download product. What's more, although I disagree with the programmers philosophy of forcing me to share files, I think, in the end, it made me a more responsible sharer. And it is somewhat comforting knowing others using xolox can't just arbitrarily stop my upload without a little effort. I started to leave xolox always on and share a substantial amount of files. Now Xolox is gone (so to speak) and I am lost.

I still use Bearshare, it works great. But it's not my choice for constant uploads for various reasons. IMHO The next most important step for Bearshare to take is to figure out multi-threaded up/downloads. There is no greater user friendly option then this.

I guess I'll check out eDonkey (but what's up with that name)?