(To obtain the most recent BearShare 5.1 installer with upgraded settings, see post #2 below) - Edit by Lord of the Rings or here.

If you have any version at or above 5.2.0.6 your downloads can be arbitrarily stopped or limited by Free Peers at any time. This is what happened early this week when everyone with these new versions suddenly found themselves completely unable to download and then spent several hours at a crippled rate.

Vinnie just had to test his new weapon, possibly to show the RIAA lawyers breathing down his neck that he could do it.

To protect yourself from future episodes of sabotage, I suggest you switch to versions older than 5.2.anything and never upgrade again. If upgrade dialogs are a bother try the expired beta 5.1.0b25 and use the BearStart utility to run it. (edit: BearStart does not run on Windows 8 for everyone) (Instead, an alternative BSLoader can be obtained to work on any Windows version & with custom delay options & no pop-up window like BearStart.)
* BearShare Beta 5.1 runs in forced ultrapeer mode and requires port forwarding for modems/routers. A firewalled ultrapeer is not good for the network or your personal use, so make sure you port forward your modem to allow BS 5.1's incoming port for both TCP & UDP.

Updates:

BearShareV6 and BearShareV7:
Are both fakes. They are not P2P applications at all but are instead a sales platform for a
limited repertoire of DRM-infested music files. Users are tightly limited in what they can
search for and anything they try to share is "fingerprinted" so that all unapproved files wil
be rejected.

BearFlix.
A crippled version of BearShare that limits users to images and short videos only. It still
works on gnutella but the abilities to search and download are too badly crippled for it to
be useful at all

"Cracked" BearShare Pro:
At best, not worth your time because the beta listed above gives you better control and
the download maximums are the same or better. At worst, one of the cracked versions
was improperly packaged with an old freepeers.ini file with the GUID
69D4F5C2D934FBEC6FC6CB06BDD32D29. Having a non-unique GUID breaks push
downloads, causing what amounts to a DDOS against anybody with the defective software
who happen to be firewalled and also against anybody who tries to download any file
hosted by them. All firewalled users with this GUID are being blocked from the network in
the Fullsize Hostiles List and the gnutella templist hosted by Bluetack. If you were
wondering why your cracked Pro was performing so badly even as at kept your bandwidth
maxed out all the time, now you know.