I've been using Gnucleus for a while and I too have noticed a higher-then-normal percentage of "unable to connect" messages recently. OTOH, ever since the Morpheus switch, my five upload slots are *constantly* filled, so someone out there is connecting just fine

It's not clear to me why a server should return a positive search result then refuse a connection for the file transfer. If all the upload slots are filled, we should be getting the "retrying in x seconds" response that was pointed out above. I guess it's possible some clients are misconfigured or there's some client incompatibility issues, but I don't know what else would cause so many "unable to connect" responses.

In any case, I found that it just takes a little perseverance to get the files you want (especially those 192 kbps mp3s!). Eventually a server will allow you to connect. You may have to recycle your connections a few times and re-search, or try at a different time, but eventually I've gotten every file I've looked for, no matter how rare.