do you have to share your files in order to be able to download???

The answer is NO.

But you will find that most users will not allow you to download from them if you are not sharing any files.
The fundamental purpose of P2P is all about SHARING - if it's all one way, you are classified as a LEECH and won't get very far, not with me anyway.

OIC, so how do you know if someone isnt sharing any files?

A very simple way is to BROWSE the user to see if they have any relevent files in their shared folder.

There's Leech filters within LW. Some people might have them set to a minimum of 5 files to share, some perhaps 50 & others 500. That means that a leech would never be able to connect & downld from such people & would be missing out on a potentiallly large choice of files to downld. lol

Not sharing & uploading also means missing out on better search & downld results.

To be fair though, a lot of users are running scared of the R.I.A.A.

A good remedy is Peer Guardian and/or an effective firewall.