Morpheus (and Grokster) are essentially the same thing as Kazaa... they access the same network (just like the different Gnutella clients)... as for the spyware... I look at it as a nessecary evil... these companies need some revenue producing method... I personally don't use Kazaa all that often (once, twice a month, maybe)... I'm on Win2K and haven't had problems with Kazaa... when you install you get to choose which of these programs are installed with the exception of Bonzai Buddy...

fflewddur... I agree somewhat... some clients have been known to do bad things to the network (automated searches, dropping d/l's from dis-similar clients, sending bad messages, reporting bad network sizes, allowing large TTL's, etc) bickering is a nessecary evil in order to provide some forward momentum on the protocol... the clients need to maintain some semblance of order otherwise the whole thing could go to sh-t.

"Such a feature would have to be protocol based"

Not nessecarily... you can circumvent deficiencies in the protocol sometimes by using different methods... look at Limewire 1.7... it comes with a fully instant messaging utility built in... Gnucleus uses IRC for chat (although no one is ever on) ;-)... browsing hosts used to be common as essentially you have a web server running on your machine beacuse you need to upload via HTTP... I haven't used bearshare in a while but I know it used to have a browse host feature... Limewire also used to have a browse host feature... so all of these "features" are possible with the current protocol in place... modifications of the protocol to include these features would just make the network a tighter unit... I have read the protocol... it, like you said it really only covers the distributed search... so essentially all gnutella is, is a distributed search engine... but like so many developers have shown it is possible to get around these...

I mean a browse host feature would be as simple as every client simply keeping a HTML file on the computer... this would have a list of all the shared files... then you just make all of the files have URL's... I believe that's what bearshare does (or did)... most of these things are possible... and trust me I would love to help build the code for such things but I can't code to save my life... so that really limits me to simply suggesting things for the network...