If you have any version at or above 5.2.0.6 your downloads
can be arbitrarily stopped or limited by Free Peers at any
time. This is what happened early this week when everyone
with these new versions suddenly found themselves
completely unable to download and then spent several
hours at a crippled rate.

Vinnie just had to test his new weapon, possibly to show
the RIAA lawyers breathing down his neck that he could do it.

To protect yourself from future episodes of sabotage, I
suggest you switch to versions older than 5.2.anything and
never upgrade again. If upgrade dialogs are a bother try
the expired beta 5.1.0b25 and use the BearStart utility to run it.

where can I get an older version of bear share? (please)

__________________

thats what happened to me thats th reason i downloaded limewire...but im having connection problems

I don't know if this link is any good http://download.bearshare.com/

But personally I'd go for BearShare Lite
http://www.filehippo.com/download_bearshare_lite/

Make sure your firewalls are properly configured! Also your modem/router since most high speed modems have NAT firewalls! Make sure you enable UPnP or else manual port forward from here http://portforward.com/routers.htm

The links for b25 and BearStart are in the top post. Accept no substitutes. ;]
(Seriously. That's the best bear of all time. Some of the built-in limits were
cranked way beyond reasonable for testing purposes [like 50 streams per
download] so it's effectively unlimited in power.)

Well I just tried installing bearshare lite, but it says that it is not a valid win32 application. Is there a way around this or I just cant use it?

The file you downloaded was probably damaged. Try the two programs in the post at the top of this thread.

thats the one I tried

Are you sure you tried "BSTEST05010b25.exe" and not "BSLITEINSTALL.exe"?
I just tried and it's good. Try downloading it again.

Well I tried downloading it one more time. First one I tried was from the top post (AaronWalkhouse) and it didnt work, so I tried the next one (in Lord of the Rings post) and it worked great. Im not sure if there is a difference between them tho, but somebody else might be able to tell. It was the "BSLITEINSTALL.exe" one that worked for me. Is there a difference? I hope I just didnt get a dodgy one.....

But thank you for helping me.

Im so happy to have BearShare back, without all the "extras"

I have pro and it said not to download it if you have pro, it automatically downloaded an update the other day (5.2.2) and since then the only thing that will download is music.

I wish bearshare didnt do an update.

Mine seems to be going ok now.

~Sonya~
I would help you if I could, but I dont have pro.

I heard that imesh went the same way at the end. It stopped downloading
video files unless they were very small. It wouldn't surprise me if they made
the same fatal error with BearShare.

If you have pro and install any other version it will still recognize your license,
regardless of what the company may say. The beta will still have better
performance than Pro too.

I just uninstalled the pro and redownloaded an earlier version, so now it works fine.

They left out the adware. There was no point in rewriting the first page of the installer too.