I'm not sure how reliable this info is, but I was advised by someone that IMESH actually tracks your browsing and other online habits to use against you in targetting spam, etc and so is probably a good one to avoid. See the post I put up about it. I guess the above responses answer your other questions, but i wanted to add that the networking of this family of clients, gnotella being one, is modelled much more in the way the general internet is, with no central or main servers, but a distribution of stored data (shared files in this case) which are available to anyone on the network. you are making your queries effectively to all of us, rather that a catalog database somewhere that can be busy or get prosecuted or sued by copyright lawyers. Not that anyone would do anything illegal here though!!!!