I've recently bought the pro version,5.2.1. Does this mean that it is worthless to me now? Who is vinnie and what is his new toy? I'm new to bear share and not up to date on this.

It will work until Vinnie (the guy who created BearShare) pulls the plug on
command of his new RIAA masters. The new toy is the remote control he added
in 5.2.0 to stop all downloads or reduce their speed.

Of course there is the slim possibility that he won't do it, but now that he has
added this shutdown capability while in negotiations with the RIAA I advise that
nobody trust any version of BearShare released after 5.2.0.

its sad to see bs go. maybe there will be a chance to get good bs back. instead of those people from imesh running it.

Slim chance. The first thing they did was abandon the relatively harmless and
removable Whenu adware and replaced it with one of the worst spyware apps
and locked it in so you can't run BearShare without being spied upon.

It's like they are deliberately trying to destroy BearShare. I wouldn't advise
anyone to touch BearShare 5.2.0 and up anymore because you simply cannot
trust the people involved in it anymore. That they hide away from us appears
to be proof enough that their intentions are to exploit users for a quick buck
and that they are still as stupid as in the years they put out that notorious
spyware bundle called iMesh.

just noticed that the stats are now gone http://www.bearshare.com/stats/

Too bad: I was expecting BShare to have shown 1 million users this week, since the stats hit 997 K a few times last week.

The page is now "Copyright 2006 Musiclab, LLC All Rights Reserved."

They probably realized it showed when and how much they were throttling
downloads and true to form, they want to avoid the users as much as possible.

Did Vinnie already shut it down? And who is music lab? Maybe I will make friends with the iMesh guys. Not really. And ask them why did they add Zango.

Is there nowhere that hosts BearShare's earlier versions now?

Vinnie is out of the picture now, but he apparently set the average download
speed down to 64Kbps before he left and the Musiclab guys (the new
RIAA-approved american front of iMesh) apparently haven't corrected it yet.

Maybe they don't know how. Left to run free, the average was around 640K.

I'm not going to talk to them until they grow up, come out of their shell and
face the public as honest men. They know how to find me already but, of
course, it looks like we don't matter to them at all except as pockets to pick.

There's a link in Sticky: BearShare has been sabotaged.
and there are always copies being shared.
No doubt the retro versions sites keep some too.