I thought the problem was my software being old - I had bearshare and it worked very well for a while but lately works very poorly. Most downloads never started no matter how good the host or how many sources there were. Those downloads that did start would go slowly and usually never finish. The problem seemed worse on larger files.

I downloaded limewire to get a more recent client (and with no spyware) and it does the exact same thing. I have a very fast connection (15 mbps) that I don't have trouble with anything else on. I have it configured as T1 because upload is only 2 mbps. I thought maybe the problem was not sharing but I have since turned on file sharing. Often even when I've chosen a four star file with lots of sources I get "need more sources" after a few minutes.

Does anyone know what could be causing this?