Hi

Whether people can upload depends upon a number of possible factors. Are you, for example, currently sitting on an American school, university or workplace LAN? If so, the odds are that, fearing legal action, the system administrator is reducing the bandwidth to avoid litigation from the RIAA. Have you a firewall? If not, what settings have you put into Preferences? If you have cut the number of slots for uploads or reduced the allocation of bandwidth, you could be cutting yourself off from the world. There are so many issues to explore but, on the basis of the slight information you have provided, no way of knowing what your particular problem is nor how it mught be resolved.

And, as you say, your own files do not show up in your own searches.