Right-click on BearShare and BearStart and set their properties to run as an
administrator and in XP compatibility mode. That'll get you going and might
eliminate the crashes too.

Already did that. No worky for the BS Test version. Now bearshare has taken over my browser when i'm logged on as the admin. Won't even allow me to navigate to this site from there. What up with that?? Had to log on as a sub-user to get here. Didn't affect the sub-user accounts, only the admin account. Ran Spybot search and destroy which came up with 14 hits. Fixed the hits but is must not have completely cleaned it. GRRRRRRRRRR!!!

The problem seems to be in the Bearstart program. Vista is now telling me there is a compatibility problem with it because it is an older program. That really burns me because i really like the BS test version. Ah well, back to BS Lite. I am REALLY starting to hate Vista.

I have the free bearshare account.
everything is working fine in terms of downloading songs, but the "people" tab on the left hand side no longer lets me browse people online for chat and stuff.
Any ideas whats going on?
does this feature expire?
Is their servers down or something?
I have emailed bearshare so i will post their answer up here if anyone is having the same problems:
When you click on people, the central area where you would normally see peoples profiles just says "page not found", there is no info about this message on any help site....i turned off all firewalls just in case something was being blocked but im at a loss.

i am using version 6.1.0.42623

i downloaded the bearsharelite program as recommended, but it doesn't have the chat features, profile features or i couldn't find them and that is what i liked.