trap_jaw,

thanks for the info regarding the incoming.

improving gui vs improving core: i completely understand your points. you represent the programmer's/power-user's point of view.

otto normalverbraucher perceives things differently. the look and feel has lots to do with subjective perception of performance, coolness and how new and advanced something is.

i'm caught somewhere in between these two but i realize there needs to be a balance, and currently, there's an exclusive emphasis on making the core better, and that's bad.

the fact that these columns are hidden (because they display misleading info?) doesn't solve the problem. the solution would be some clearly readable stats regarding requested/sucessful/failed uploads and dropped/missing messages. it is reassuring to know that your uploads actually arrive somewere.

regarding the progress bars: if a host downloads from 4 other hosts, it can't possibly start at 0% with all four of them. and what about other vendors? do they also download starting at 0?

looking at the questions in the forum, it seems that at least some of them are misunderstandings because of the GUI being unclear.

i'm sorry i was so rantsy earlier. it's the old story of industrial designers and engineers. they tend to have very different ideas of what the probem is.