Glad you think the ads look alright. If you click on the Amazon ones to do late Christmas shopping, we get some of the profit =).

As far as the connections issue, older 1.8 clients did not have any logic in them to take advantage of new UltraPeers, although this would have been very nice. We really merged in three major projects into 1.9 that had previously developed relatively independently (the swarmed downloading, the UltraPeers, and the query routing, which had undergone an earlier sort of merge with UltraPeers), and none of these had previously been in the code.

Moving forward, we should see some really nice improvements as more nodes become UltraPeers.