Hi, i've been having a problem in the last 5 months, on and off i've been trying to get connected to the network using different programs and i've tried everything.

In limewire there is no brick wall, there is no problem with firewalls
I use ares and that connects fine
I did port forwarding.
About 5 months ago and before that, i could use limewire perfectly, then it started having connection problems, now i cannot get connected.
I've tried the off brands, bearshare, ect, nothing works
bearshare shows that i dont have a firewall problem
i cant figure it out, my isp says they dont block it

i have:
Windows XP home
Lynksys Befsr41 v.2 router (yes it is port forwarded, yes UnPn is enabled)
i have wireless internet from Netpoint communications
i have no other firewalls other than windows,(yes it is configured perfectly)
i did the test to connect to port 6346 from the link, that worked fine

please help

You're either port forwarded OR you're using UPnP. I'm not sure how you can do both at the same time & definitely not have both enabled within LimeWire at the same time. It makes a difference. If you port forwarded then you should set LW to manual port forwarding. If your connection device is set to UPnP enabled, then LW should also be set to UPnP.

I would tend to think from your description of your history that your isp is to blame. Who is your isp (internet service provider)? (ISP's always say they don't block when they do!!! It's PR!!!)

I might suggest to try deleting your LW Preferences folder whilst LW is closed; instructions here: Point #2 & 3 in Fixes for Limewire (sample image included at bottom of page.) & then reset your options in LW next time you open it. ie: set LW to manual port forward or UPnP depending upon how your device is set up & enabled.

thanks for the reply, yeah, i've tried what you said many times in the past, i've tried it both ways on limewire, with no luck, yes, i've deleted the preferences folder, no luck, i want to know, why would ares connect, and not Gnutella,

Perhaps because Gnutella & limewire are the popular nowadays & these are the ones the isp are having bandwidth over-use problems with ... thus they target LW & bearshare, etc.

You could try at different times of day. Some isp's only apply these filters during peak hours ... whatever that means.

It is easy to prove that your ISP blocks Gnutella. Well, at least as long as you know what's going on on your machine. There might be some "personal fyrewa11z" which actually block Gnutella because P2P is dangermouse!!1

Anyway, just do a manual test using "telnet" or a similar terminal tool. Even Windows has that, right? Connect to a known external (i.e., not on your machine or local network) Gnutella peer with telnet and type these lines *exactly* as they are. Use Copy & Paste because you won't be able to type them fast enough manually:

GNUTELLA CONNECT/0.6
X-Ultrapeer: False
User-Agent: Human/1.0beta

and then hit ENTER twice get an empty line and wait a moment. A Gnutella peer would respond with at least one line like this:

GNUTELLA/0.6 200 OK
[a lot of header lines]

or

GNUTELLA/0.6 503 Full

If the connection simply terminates, then your either not connected to a Gnutella peer at all or there could be some Gnutella filter. If that happens try again but this time use normal HTTP. Connect and type this:

HEAD / HTTP/1.0

and then hit ENTER twice to get an empty line. A Gnutella peer or
web server would send a reply like this:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK

or

HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable

The numbers and the message will vary but you should see something starting with "HTTP/" as response. Try both 2-3 times. It is possible that peers are overloaded and simply drop your connection. This can happen but it won't happen all the time. So if you get a HTTP response from the peer but the Gnutella handshake always causes a terminated response, you can be pretty sure that there IS an Gnutella filter active, you cannot be certain on which side though. It could be the ISP of the remote. However, if you try this with a couple of IP address from completely different ranges, you can be fairly certain that it's your ISP.

Some ISPs seemingly do not block Gnutella inside their own network which indicates they are more worried about traffic (because internal traffic does not cost them anything).

To find fresh addresses of peers, you can simply open this URL with your browser:
http://galvatron.dyndns.org:59009/gw...1.0&hostfile=1

This works with all GWebCaches listed here:
http://gcachescan.jonatkins.com/

Just replace the part before the '?' with any of the listed URLs. Actually if you cannot load any of those URLs at all, you know that your ISP is dead serious about blocking Gnutella.

I know this may sound more complicated than it actually is. It would be easy to automice this check with fairly simply scripts but (un)fortunately, Windows is not really programmer friendly, so you have to find someone else to write such a check tool for Windows.