Why won't it just end?
 

Win 2k - no matter which client - bearshare, gnotella, limewire - the same thing happens. When I exit the client the process continues to run. It cannot be killed in either task manager or process viewer. If I start the client back up, a second instance gets created and a minute later bluescreens me. This is with the current versions of all clients.

Is there a workaround or is this a feature I have to live with?

It sounds like that's a problem with your computer, not the clients. I've never heard of that problem before.

Well, I've isolated the problem to ZoneAlarm.
It I shutdown zonealarm and then run gnotella, everything is fine. With zonealarm running, the client process cannot be stopped.

Is this a zonealarm bug, or does it have something to do with the gnutella protocol?