When you follow the instructions at portforward.com, the 1st thing they tell you to do is set up a static ip. Make sure you set Bearshare to use the port you forwarded. Oh something I forgot to mention, only one program can use a particular port in a single session of your computer being booted up. So "if" you still have LW installed, you should forward a different port for it or BS & of course set the port it connects to to that one. And also, with port forwarding because it is set via computer ip id, if you wanted to use p2p programs on other computers on the network, they'd need to have separate port forwardings using different ports. So their port forwarding would need to be set 'from' each computer. That's because each will have a different ip id on the network. I hope that doesn't sound confusing.