So perhaps I should have marked my connection as "dial-up" as I'm cheap and the DSL package I could afford is 256/64 and does limit me to 2 gig a month. But for that to disappear in three days time, and I've only got a collection of maybe 40 files to share? Something went terribly wrong somewhere and I don't have any other answer than to stop sharing. If an admin sees this and has some suggestion I might be convinced to share again, but I'm not going to be paying through the nose just so someone can grab files. Who stole all my bandwidth???

George

When you're connected to the Gnutella network bandwidth is used to pass search queries between hosts. This steady stream of traffic steady adds up from what I have seen and I wouldn't be too surprised if two gigs of data transferred in a few days.

If you share half the number of files you probably will cut you data usage by more than half since you only receive search queries that are similar to your shared files when connected to an ultrapeer.

If you're using an Ultrapeer-capable client, disable its ability to become an Ultrapeer. If you're an Ultrapeer (and probably likely if you have a speedy DSL connection - even though you selected "Dial-up"), you become a hub for dozens of other Gnutella clients - you're doing all the hard work for them, including responding to queries for them. If it continues, I recommend selecting another Gnutella client.

Turning off Ultrapeer looks like it may be the answer. Now when I check the Monitor window, requests are not flying by like they used to and maybe the message "Your client is a leaf-node shielded by an Ultrapeer. Hence you will see few or no searches in the monitor window" would be more appropriate now. I've opened Sharing for the colossal 24 files I have available again. Thanks for the help!

George