the community connections I think have a little bit of problem... namely no one uses them... so there is no one to connect too. Thats the impression I get is that no one else has made a point to attempt to be in those communities so they are empty and therefore there is no one to connect to.

As far as connecting to the entire network... good luck this will never happen... (unless the network shrinks unexpectedly.) Gnutella is set up in a different way then most other files sharing communities it is based on a many to many connection scheme. So each person connects to a bunch of people. Imagine a giant crowd of people standing on the street. Now imagine you ask the guy next to you if he has lets say "water". Now lets assume he doesn't. Well now assume he asks someone beside him if they have water for you. And that person asks the person next to them etc... so your question is passed on to many people. Now imagine that instead of asking just the guy beside you, you ask 4 different people around you; and each of those 4 ask the people around them... that is the gnutella network a bunch of computers passing a message along. And if someone has "water" they respond to your question by the same route that they were asked. But because of the nature of the network not everyone will be asked at any particular point, some people will be skipped and sometimes the message just doesn't reach the end of the crowd..... so realistically you can't search all of gnutella, but you can search the portion that you are connected to. If you can't find the file your looking for... disconnect and then reconnect to the network you'll essentially be placed in a different spot amongst the crowd and will now have different people to ask if they have "water".