For starters, you can switch it to ultrapeer mode at any time instead of
waiting for it to do so automatically. That gets you 26 peer connections to
other high-outdegree ultrapeers and 45 leaf nodes too. Not only do your
searches become extra powerful, they also go into passive mode after a
couple of minutes and accumulate relevant hits from all the traffic passing
through.

BearShare's download limits, already stronger than LimeWire Pro's, were
greatly expanded to 50 streams per file to weed out weaknesses in the
networking and download modules. You almost never reach 50, but you
definitely never end up with a slower download just because the software
settled on the first 17-20 sources to respond.

The automatic upgrade functions no longer do anything because b25 was the
last in it's line. That means no background downloads and uploads of the
installer and no nag. No other version of BearShare are immune like this.