Ok, so I uninstalled McA and I get a full green bar connection status, BUT I am still behind a firewall somewhere... I have completely disable windows firewall and upon trying another p2p application, I got a message saying it was a NAT problem... I have the netgear firewall disabled and did some research... it appears my modem (the zyxel 600) is the culprit (or one of them). Unfortunately I cannot access my modems configuration by using the 192.168.1.1 or any other sequence... the only place I can get to with these is the routers configuration pages. I called earthlink (the provider of the modem) spent nearly an hour with them... arguing even... to be told they dont know how to help me.... I asked for a senior rep, but got lost in the 'transfer'... so I am not quite back to square one, but square two, I would say. I read the forum threads you sent and other than the McA, cant find the solution..........

Any ideas? Anybody?

I can use limewire and it downloads fairly efficiently, but have a question... Can LW handle torrents? I cant seem to open them in LW manually, nor can I change what the saved torrents use to open to LW....

Thanks for the assistance,
Melissa