I want to thank Vinnie for his response in this thread regarding BearShare and New.net.

My own experience with BearShare was this:

I already had Limewire on my system... I decided to try BearShare.

After installing BearShare I immediately began having problems with errors and freezes.. I also began having problems with Limewire and my browsers. I thought the problems were associated with BearShare and uninstalled it.

The problems continued.

It began to appear that the problems were actually associated with the file: newdotnet2_109dll.

I didn't know where this file came from or what it was about. After some searching on the Usenet I learned the file was created by installing the New.net plugin on my system and that others were experiencing problems with this file or variations of it. I hadn't been aware that I'd installed the New.net plugin. Apparently I did when I installed BearShare and not payed much attention to the choices present during the installation process.

After getting the New.net plugin and the newdotnet dll file off my system my I'm running fine.

I will probably try BearShare again at some point. I will be paying attention to the installation and be very careful about what actually is installed.