Thanks, Birdy.

I've deleted my Prefs file several times and scoured for oldies (I think I caught 'em all and I've deleted my gnutella file a couple of times for good effort too). And this is with all d/ls, not just a few, and it's been since the last few upgrades, although to be fair, I'm one of the people who was getting zero search results for a couple of months and then suddenly started getting some when I was playing around with Java of all things. So I can't really count what I was getting from the last couple of updates.

It seems worse when I'm downloading music and it doesn't seem to matter how many hosts there are. I suppose the number of hosts could be exaggerated because of spammers and the single host responses could be DSLers with low bandwidth dedications.

4.18.8 is my personal enemy, lol. I'm never going there again.

Of course I missed the thread you linked to...I just knew I'd miss something obvious to try, argh.

Thank you!!

(Oops, my ISP is Charter - they seem to be okay when my son is playing Warcraft, the little geek, so I don't think they're restricting my bandwidth even though they ARE one of the evil empire)