Vinnie Falco's (the creator of Bearshare) attitude recently is the reason that have uninstalled Bearshare from my box and have
moved to Gnucleus. I have always been disturbed by the spyware bundling, but put up with it because I thought Bearshare was the best servent available. Then I found out about the encrypted message packets that Bearshare sends out and that disturbed me more. I have never heard a pausible explanation for these encrypted messages from Vinnie to this date.

Finally, within the past week, Vinnie has posted several messages on the Bearshare forums which include vitriolic
comments about folks who may have questiond his judgement in using the spyware and has threatened to shut down the Adware forum on Bearshare.net. He has also been censoring posts which are critical of Bearshare. That was enough for me.

I decided to try a couple of servents that I had never tried to find an alternative to Bearshare and I stumbled upon Gnucleus. Let me tell you folks, Gnucleus is as good, if not better than Bearshare. In many ways it IS better than Bearshare. It is more stable, seems to return more search results which are better organized, and the download resume features are a lot more
intuitve. But best of all, there is NO SPYWARE, it sends no encrypted packets, and is OPEN SOURCE. I uninstalled Bearshare and I'm not looking back. Gnucleus is serving all my Gnutella needs without all the hassle and worry associated with Bearshare. I'd urge anyone who has doubts or privacy concerns about Bearshare to check it out.

Hope this helps...