Jay, thanks very much for the enthusiastic support, and I'm glad you're enjoying the program. I do really want to discourage anybody on the forums from personally attacking each other, though -- let's try to keep this a nice and clean operation, ok?

The final release should have significant improvements in a number of areas, although they might not be immediately apparent. We will probably be releasing another beta today with the new changes.

As far as the download mesh goes, the previous poster was correct. A download mesh relies on the basic observation that you can easily keep a record of who has successfully uploaded from you, storing their ip address. Then, when you respond to another query for a file that you have, you can also return the ip addresses of everyone else who has successfully downloaded that file from you -- this provides new peers for swarmed downloads extremely cheaply.

The mesh part really comes in when you request the file from one of the ips returned in the first list, and it returns another list of ips of hosts who have successfully uploaded from it, and so one. Quite quickly (and with very few messages) you can get a long list of hosts who have a given file. This addresses the issue of scalability in a whole new way, as you can easily know all you need to know (that they have the damn file) about hosts otherwise not within your network horizon.