Lately my library has been acting slow. If I play songs all in a row, bearshare freezes in between songs, for a few minutes... how can i sppeed things up?

Which part of BearShare freezes? The media player only? The GUI?
Everything, dropping connections and halting downloads?

There are many versions of BearShare. Not knowing which one prevents me
from even guessing at a solution.

Show us the exact steps to reproduce the freeze you saw.

Its the media player thats running slow. I'll listen to a song, but then when the song is over, it takes about 2 minutes before it starts playing the next song...its like the media player is having trouble finding the songs.

Try turning the internal player off (it's just a plugin form of WiMP) and use
another external player instead.

In Setup/Options change the preference for "Preview/Play in Theater" to "For
video playback only" or "Never". BearShare will start using your default music
player instead, which just might perform better than the Microsoft product. ;]