Well, I thought I found a fix to my own problem. But now I've got a worse problem.

I found a place in the "preferences" "connections" menu where it says to "drop nodes if fewer than 30 friends". This seemed like an excessive default to me so I changed it to 10 friends.

Then the gnutellahosts.com cache seemed to work (the router.limewire.com and host.gnutella.hostcache.com caches still give me nothing. At least I got action and I finally connected again. (By the way, I'm on a dial-up and I have connections set for min 3 and max 5)

But even these connections fizzled out after ten minutes or so. After that nothing would work to raise any more connections. So I closed Gnucleus and restarted it. It still wouldn't connect after restarting. It just ran through the entire list of 200 or so IP addresses, one by one, and never found even the most temporary connection.

So then I shut down everything, rebooted (Wi***) and started my ISP connection up. Then I clicked on the Gnucleus icon. Briefly grayed out, then nothing. No program screen. Nothing showing in the systray or on the task manager. I clicked the icon several times. Still nothing showed in the systray, but task manager showed multiple copies running.

This wasn't good so I rebooted AGAIN and started up my ISP and clicked on the Gnucleus icon. Again, nothing showing and nothing in the task manager.

I guess Gnucleus has shut itself down and I can't use it anymore. Any ideas out there?