This is something I hope can be improved on LW. My approach for doing a search for those rare files is if nothing comes up, to delete all my ultrapeers and do the search again and again. At times I've run both Frostwire and Limewire giving me access to 9 ultrapeers at a time. I’m not sure there’s any advantage to that though.

Which brings up a question you might be able to answer. I'm sharing some 1200 files and I'm wondering whether it's a good idea to not make them available when I'm shopping for ultrapeers. I'm not sure they hold in cache an index of all the files from all the leaves... and if I move on, it will mess up the searches of other users... or put stress on the network.

Also... speaking of searches... just how many hops does a ultrapeer pass a request on to? Just what's happening when I request "search for more sources" and it counts down from 300? And just what is Out Of Band searching?

Thanks!