Wonderful typing, please keep up the good work, but you are not correct.

Points are:

1. If you are connected to ANY other clients/hosts then your ISP isn't blocking you.
2. If you can web browse, your ISP isn't blocking you, Gnutella will work fine.
3. Everyone has a problem geting kick started on the network, gnutellahosts 6346 is too busy, your client reads old IP's first, who knows, but most times if you wait a while it will find a few recent IP's and away you go. You may want to clear your hosts list file and start from scratch, also try the limewire 6346 host list service.
4. ISP's could throttle you, then you would never know and they don't have to hear the complaints. These guys are not stupid.
5. Firewalls do not block Gnutella, see #2 above and read up on push. Push is not needed for you to download files from other clients!
6. Some idiots change to port 80 or 8080 and/or open those ports in their firewall because they have no clue.
7. This is not rocket science.

Port 6436 is for incoming connections, it is where you listen, you can set any port because you tell others that you are on that port so they can find the files you are sharing. You don't need a "public" incoming listen port to operate on the network!

Let me say this again, you don't need this listen port to download, search, or upload!

Once you connect via a "outgoing" connection YOU CREATED AND OPENED to any other host, you are able to receive and send packets, search, request push, whatever. If you download direct, you create a connection to the host server directly! It is on lower ports like 2000 or 1000 range, just like any browser does, so...

IF YOU WERE BLOCKED YOU COULDN'T BROWSE!!!!!

Changng your client to port 80 or 8080 is STUPID because those ports are for web SERVERS! Then you really tell your ISP you have a sever running (if they even bother scanning all the computers hooked up to the network). Hackers are scanning for these ports, don't think it's your ISP, they have better things to do like download DIVX porn via their T3.

ISP's would look for high bandwidth use on a every day basis, if they bother at all. On a 56K line, who cares?

So stop thinking it's your ISP and see if the girl next door is hooked into your phone line and if she is, make a DIVX movie of her naked in the shower and SHARE IT (just kidding).

Let's go over this again. If you CREATE a connection firewalls assume you want to do that and allow the connection because YOU CREATED IT. You could close everything via a firewall and still browse if it allows "outgoing" connections. Gnutella would work just fine! You could still be hacked if you had a program that CREATED a connection to Mr. Hacker, so don't feel so safe and get a better OS and quit using MS "we never fix security holes because we are too busy taking your hard earned $$" products like Outlook.

If you can web browse Gnutella WILL WORK!

Port 80 or 8080 are SERVER PORTS! Servers LISTEN on them for HTTP requests. Your browser DOESN'T USE PORT 80 ! YOU ARN'T RUNNING A WEB SERVER!

Please feel free to post this any time someone asks about this.