Hi Linda:

Go to the 'Connections' window, click the 'Advanced' tab, select one of the nodes listed on the right hand side, then click 'Remove'. Repeat with the other nodes. Gnucleus will then use its host cache to establish connections to new nodes to meet the minimum number specified in your connections settings (Edit|Preferences|Connect). I referred to this process as 'recycling your connections'.

The reason this works is because the way Gnutella is designed, you are only effectively connected to a subset of the network at any given time. When you send a search request, the nodes you see listed in the 'Connections' window relay that request to all the nodes they're connected to, and so on *upto a point*. Even though this procedure searches a large number of nodes, you're still only searching a subset of the whole Gnutella network. When you 'recycle connections', you're effectively connecting to a different subset of the network which may have the file you're looking for when the first subset didn't.

Oh, and if you love message boards, you'd probably enjoy Usenet immensely . I really wish all these boards were hosted on nntp servers, instead of this ungainly web interface.

HTH,