You may be having a hard time connecting simply because tou are going through a proxy and a firewall. Either one alone will slow connection time, and a firewall actually limits the number of hosts you can even use. Xolox may simply be having a hard time finding hosts to connect to. You also may want to make sure there is nothing wrong with you cache list (there have been problems with bad caches).
http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...threadid=16252