If your having trouble connecting to people there are two other host cache's out there:

router.limewire.com:6346
gnutella.hostcache.com:6346

Also the problem is gnutella doesn't let you know if someone has all of their download slots full so sometimes you get the busy because that person is unavailable. I don't use bearshare but does it automatically retry when it gets a busy or does it just quit? Seeing as how you were behind a firewall then that may have contributed to the problem. Even when your turned off though connecting to firewalled user is ussually a pain. So if you can try to avoid d/l'ing from them. My best suggestion is to download a program like FURI or Limewire. FURI has d/l candidates and limewire has grouping. With FURI you pick a file and start the download and if while your going through the results you find anything similar you click on "candidate" this allows you to add it as a back up to the other file. Limewire works a little more automatically. It groups all similar files together and then you essentially attempt download the "group". It tries each grouped connection until it can connect and then downloads from there. If that person closes their connection, or something happens to the connection Limewire just tries the next in the list. Limewire also tries continuously to get something from a busy server. So if you really want a file all you need to do is queue it up and wait until you connect Limewire will take care of the rest. Albeit sometimes it takes 2-3 days to finish a process like this which is a real bitch.

However I'm sure that your biggest problem is the firewall stuff cause I have huge problems downloading from firewalled users. The other problem may be, are you sharing anything? I don't allow people who don't share to download from me and I'm sure that there are many others like me out there....

Hope this helps.