If the first light far right is red, if you hover your cursor over-top, it will say if you are firewalled or not. Also, if you enable views, enable the Console. Check the first 10-20 lines of what it prints onto screen after you open the program. This might tell you what the problem is.

If you know how to port forward, then you could try that. Perhaps something has changed in your configuration. A port forward should test whether the problem is UPnP or not. UPnP does not work with all routers/modems & I suspect BearShare's version was an early UPnP technology.

The BearShare community that connects as ultrapeers does not seem very large these days. So small that I used to struggle to obtain the full compliment of BearShare ultrapeers whilst using BS Beta. I connected to 13 BearShare ultrapeers half an hour ago.

As far as the "New Trick" suggested by File_Girl, I'm not sure if the force-ultrapeer mode works for the regular release BearShare. Someone commented it doesn't work for BS 5.1 Pro. As for the other details, if BS fails to connect, you should recheck the details in the freepeers file before you restart the program.

I doubt an out of date GWebcache file would be the problem. BS will usually find new ones.

Until you can connect, you might be better to either use the non-Japanese Hostiles or perhaps not use any at all. That might mean you connect to some BOTs, but the idea is to get that initial connection & check that BS is not firewalled.

I've updated the connection installer & connect file. But it's not much of an update.

BTW I tried BS Light 5.2.1 a week ago. It started to connect but then crashed. Then connection problems so I changed details in the freepeers file & port forwarded & it connected as an ultrapeer. GTK peers didn't seem to like connecting to it though.

Edit: Right-click BearShare & choose Run as Administrator. That might help. (Alternative is to set the compatibility privilege level to Run as Administrator in BearShare's properties.)

On my side of things, my VM system crashed late last year or in January. Since then BS on Win 7 & XP struggles to connect due to firewalled. So I used Win 2 k or Win 8 or both instead.