It seems to be "in" these days to bag on microsoft. Too bad you don't actually know what is wrong with microsoft products so you resort to petty trolling.

As far as firewalls are concerned, yeah some people are paranoid, others just want to control what goes in and out of their computer. A lot of people are also on LANs, sharing a single internet connection between multiple computers.

I run a soft firewall and sit behind a router, and I was able to set things up to give me a "direct" connection to gnutella. Unfortunately not everyone is capable of doing this. Either they do not know how or they do not have access to do network administration.

The problem isn't with people using firewalls. The problem is the lack of proxy support in gnutella clients (among other things.) This is something that is being worked on around the development community.

So in the mean time be patient and quit bitching about people that have decided to share files. You're getting this all for free anyway.