I was kind of thrown by that .zip file comment until I read LOTR's response....since the files in the BS program files folder is either a .txt or a .dat file the mentioning of a .zip file was weird....

why the advising to use it?...because its a good program that besides the time/date hack works fine...

as far as the ol' death knell concept, might as well ring that bell for all the gnutella clients besides LW and Phex...

so you've had issues with the time date hack eh?....I never have, but my daughter has 3 times on her machine, that being the date becoming locked and refusing to go back after 15-30 seconds....

as far as comparing it to any other version of BS, the beta version does have the ol' force UP option which makes it a step above any other version...

as mentioned there are other alternatives which some would argue as being better..

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So Long and Thanks for All the Files
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The BS Test will only change clock time for a matter of a few seconds. There is no need to manually change the clock back.

Yes when the clock changes back it does cause issues with some security software, but that's a small price to pay for those who wish to continue using BS. If possible make BS an exception on all security software.
The cache zipped file 'I' supplied, I think was zipped with either the freeware TUGZip or mac osx's zip compressor which should be cross-platform compatible. TUGZip does the same thing as WinRAR & more, but is free. Zip is a more common format than rar, as not everyone has a utility to open rar files. This cache is simply an alternative to the one offered by AW & was offered to help the users in this & another couple of posts since that cache did not appear to work for them, but this one did. File appears to be Zip v.2.0. WinRar, Tugzip & another two extractors I used had no problems with opening that zip file.

More information about those who are attacking the Gnutella network? erm .. there's even a special section on this forum which discusses a part of this & links to other posts discussing about this. Not to mention the thread in question repeated in almost every section of the forums. Did you try the forum search function?
A link toward the topic of spam Virus thread: Typical virus spam file sizes - Make a note of them (click on blue link to see). Although this article was written as advice in techniques for LimeWire users, it also applies to all other gnutella clients: How to find music

BTW the same company (MusicLab LLC) that took over Bearshare also 'hijacked' ShareAza, took over their site & their forums. Now the original ShareAza devs have been forced to move to Sourceforge (just weeks ago), which is a site for open source dev projects. Any version of Shareaza above 3 is a fake & is basically identical to iMesh & bearflix. There is a link between MusicLab & the RIAA.