Bearshare is very questionable. It has these intrusive ad-ware programs that are bundled with the installation and unless you are careful you may very well wind up installing them unintentionally. Once they are installed they are difficult to remove, and several people have had their entire Operating Systems ruined trying to uninstall them.

In addition, there has been some question about non-standard encrypted data packets which only Bearshare uses. Vinnie has claimed that these are harmless and are only used for detection of obsolete versions of Bearshare, but they really could be anything. If you read these forums you will also discover that Vinnie is a rather unstable personality and should probaly not be completely trusted.

The upshot of all of this is that there are a number of stable, working servents available which are reliable and don't raise any of these issues in any way. Bearshare is no better or no worse than most of them, so why put yourself in a position of having to even think about these things when you can be using an open source servent that won't keep you up at night worrying or trying to re-install your Windows.

Try Gnucleus, Phex, Gnotella, of Limewire instead.

Hope this helps...