I have said before here that my ISP has been called by people complaining about me sharing MP3's. So I thought maybe it would be a good idea to not show the IP address of the person your downloading/uploading to right there in plain view when a client downloads off you or uploads to you. Is there any way to connect to a person without showing there IP address in the display?

WinMX doesn't show IP address info in the display and bearshare pro doesn't either, so it wouldn't effect the downloads/uploads. Maybe you could also do what bearshare pro does and use authentication to prevent non secure clients from connecting to you as well?

With these new laws in the U.S. on the way that allow gov. ***** to legally hack into your machine if you're running these types of apps, it would seem a wise precaution to at least try to make it difficult to figure out just which machine to hack.

Currently Gnutella does not support proxies, so there is no real way to hide your IP.

I don't mean hide the IP as much as I mean to just not display it in the open right there in the dialog box when you download/upload something.

Xolox doesn't desplay the IPs. But, you can easily get software to find out who you are connected to, and other Gnutella servants show IPs. Because your IP are sent to other computers, it is up to that computer to decide weather or not to display the IP. As anyone could write their own servant, you can't control wheather IPs are displayed. Note: Xolox does not display IPs.

Xolox doesn't display IP's? Oh, I haven't used it for a long time. Sorry bout that, I thought it did.

And about that software that displays network info. I use WinMX which has it's own protocol. Is it safer, or should I use Bearshare Pro with the 'authentication security' feature turned on to be safer?

I'm just really paranoid about sharing files now cause my ISP has called me twice so far telling me they have recieved calls from people complaining about what I'm sharing. (mp3 files mostly) If I get one more call, they will ban me and I'll have to switch ISP's.

i don't know how to help that. You can't prevent other users from seeing your IP through the servant they are using.