cannot respond to clients from my server thread .

[Smilin' Joe Fission]

I haven't kept up on Bearshare, but another thing I noticed is that you are using the Gnutella 0.4 protocol... last I heard, Bearshare blocks all 0.4 servents. If you add the 0.6 handshaking, you may get a response. However, what you can also do is try your testing using different servent software... like Gnucleus. I'm almost certain Gnucleus hasn't blocked 0.4 servents yet and as long as you have it set as a standard servent and not a supernode or leaf node, you'll probably get the results you're looking for (sans spy packets as well).

(EDIT: DUH! I guess I wasn't thinking... I think I got a few things straight like first, Bearshare is connecting to YOUR server. Second, obviously if you're recieving spy packets and pings from Bearshare, you're connected so it obviously still uses the 0.4 protocol.... but you may want to try another servent anyway just to see if it will give you different results. If you get the same results from a different servent, then it might help you trace it back to the source.)