Hi alan

Interesting. You're in Ultrapeer mode to show the file count, right? I installed 2.9.7 yesterday, and am very pleased. 2.9.6 was crashing, and very little success with up and down loads. LW 2.9.7 ran all night (in leaf mode; I haven't seen what happens in Ultrapeer yet) with no problems, my uploads pane is full, and downloads are proceeding better than I've seen all week.

2.9.7 fixed some mac specific bugs (not sure which ones), so I'd be leery of going back, even though 2.8.6 allowed longer searches through more hosts (network harmful).

Could it be that you just happened to get a better set of connections? I've read that the network size numbers are unreliable approximations, and vary greatly. The real test should be the numbers of files found and successfully up/down loaded.