Bear share cant connect due to gnutella connections. Joined gnutella and still nothing. Had bs for 5 years. No problems until now??

Well, first of all, which Firewall are you using?
I used to use ZoneAlarm, but quickly chucked it because it would make programs that have both incoming and outgoing traffic crash, programs like Firefox, uTorrent, and yes Bearshare and even LimeWire. These processes would ''hang'', so you couldn't even end them from the task manager, and the only way to end them was to do a hard reboot.

Check your Firewall settings, 90% chance it will be that.

For BS on Vista: Have you tried changing BS's compatitibility mode to XP SP3? Right-click the short-cut to BS & choose properties & then Compatibility ..

For connection issues, see http://www.gnutellaforums.com/host-c...bearshare.html as an option. ;) You might only wish to change the connection-cache, but BS 5.1 beta is always an option. :)