I've just had to uninstall BearShare to free up some memory. Then went to download it again and hit a problem installing it.

Everything goes fine until it gets to the Smart Shopper part of the installation, where it asks you to accept or decline and then hit next.

I can't click accept or decline. Something makes the mouse stop working. I can move it around and flick between programs using alt & tab, but I can't actually click on anything in the BearShare installation or in any other program. I even have to unplug and remove the battery to restart.

It seems a bit bizarre. Any ideas on where I'm going wrong?

Maybe your antivirus or other protections were blocking the spyware from being installed.
Try the clean version in this thread instead: Sticky: BearShare has been sabotaged.

Thanks. Okay, downloaded that and it installs fine. But it won't connect.

The four lights in top right corner - first on the left flashes red and says "Hosts - not connected" and the rest of the lights are off.

I already had the port forwarding stuff set up to allow my router use BearShare.

What can I try next?

Also, just closed BearShare, then gone to open it again and got a pop up saying

"Key expired - this copy of BearShare has expired" then I can't get into it at all.

Connection problem sorted. Not sure how exactly, but uninstalled and reinstalled via the link you gave and it's connected fine. Cheers!

I'm still having the key expired problem though. I'm gonna post it in the BS sabotaged thread.

Spoke too soon. I *was* connected, even found a file and began downloading. But after about 10 minutes it gets disconnected again.

So it's back to post 3

I think Tiscali has been blocking connections recently, but you might be able to
get around that by resetting the modem.

Try changing your listening port to something between 60,000 and 65,535,
then adjust your firewall and port forward to that port. Maybe that will take
longer than 10 minutes to detect and block. ;]