it may very well be that the person you are connecting to is busy for that long... I used to share movies over gnutella... but then it dawned on me how stupid that was... Here I was putting 650MB files available for download and I only have 15KB/s upload... it litterally took days for someone to get one of the movies... so I unshared them and now my MP3's and simpsons episodes are what I share...so basically people could be sharing huge files and that means you may never get on. The other thing is if you notice the busy signal comes with a time stamp... This means that gnutella is going to try again in this many seconds. But as you wait longer the duration increases so... if someone sneaks into use a download slot while your waiting 100s for a busy signal... you've just lost your window and the next time you try back you don't get in...