that sounded like a great idea, so i tried it. both gnucleus and shareaza take the same amount of time as my client to find a good number of other clients, so i'm not so worried about that. BUT when my custom client tries to connect to my shareaza client it says "timed out handshaking with 192.168.2.2" (they are running on different machines). it's really weird - it looks like the shareaza client is never receiving the handshake. outside hosts do - i Can connect to the network. i get the same problem when the shareaza client is on my local machine.