well i,ve just spent the last 20 mins reading about people having firewall dramas and have to say i dont understand why there are problems, i,ve got windows xp, service pack 2, zone alarm and windows firewall as well as half a dozen security measures for my kids and i have never had any problem connecting or downloading any files in the past 2 years. the brick wall has always been infront of the globe and i never thought about turning of my firewall, maybe it has something to do with how high people set there security to, i dont know, before limewire i used kazzaa and that was crap compared to this, my only gripe is people miss naming files or cutting the ends of songs of, other than that if you check your settings carefully you will have endless hours of enjoyment. this is my first post so if you think im full of it let me know, by the way i downloaded over 150 songs tonight, doest get any better than that. thanks

love the name though Only a Hobo does look a bit weird infront a message, i thought you were having a go, did i forget to mention i upload over 4000 songs all checked, all complete all the proper file name. Thanks for the reply

Stone the crows, that's good news! lol

The firewall icon might be due to a sofw firewall or internal NAT firewall in your connection devices.

like i said zone alarm and windows firewall both running just fine, never had a problem connecting downloading or sharing, for the 150 songs i downloaded at least 80 were uploaded, not a bad trade. No one kills a sharer i've noticed. sometimes i just load up 20 or 30 songs at a time from one user and they do the same, go get a coffee and an hour later its all done. 30 of those songs came from one guy at 55kbs each, one at a time mind you thats less than a minute a song. I thought i was doing what everybody else was doing, sounds like theres a lot of people with dramas out there.

Ah ... you have 2 active firewalls. No wonder. Almost all firewall companies advise against 2 active firewalls. I suspect if you turned one of them off, your brick wall might disappear. eg: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...orkonline.mspx

If it aint broke dont fix it i say, thanks for the advice though.
Ive got a feeling firewalls are not the only problem by what ive read but people too eager to download free stuff and not setting their system up first so everything runs smoothly.

Tweaking is the key to success.

Fair enough. Good luck to the crows or power this year. But not too much luck!