The stars represent your chances of connection & successful download of those files. If it's a 4 star, you have a very good chance of connecting to them. If it's a one or 2 star then it may be a dial up user or someone who is multitudes of hops away, or/and perhaps behind an unconfigured firewall (hops are ISP's between you & them, some may shape p2p bandwidth).

The reason no stars showed might have been a java issue solved with an update of Java.