It seems to me like your last paragraph is suggesting that we go back to square one, where this all began, which did not work, so we started mucking around with the 2Wire (DSL firewall) settings...???

Meanwhile...

Things are not symmetric... Fabion and I can Browse, CHAT, DL happily. My friend Dave and I ... Direct Connect file list AOK, nothing else works... what's up with that?

I think fabion runs an ultrapeer...

Yesterday, DC DL worked ONCE (Dave pulled ONE small file from me) but then every try failed every time after that... seems VERY STRANGE!!!