Shareaza

About 75% of the time when Shareaza starts, I get the error "Shareaza has detected that you are behind a NAT router or Firewall...etc". I've checked the ports, they're open and configured properly. So I do what the documentation say and go into
Tools > Shareaza Settings > Connection, and select "Enable UPnP connection devices setup". The problem is I have to KEEP DOING THIS! Why? It's more of an annoyance than anything else, but I feel that a program should be able to maintain it's settings. It's been doing this for several months (both before and after a complete reformat and reinstallation). I'm running Windows XP Professional SP3.

UPnP is for getting the forwarding to work without needing to configure the ports, if you already have the ports open and configured properly it does nothing. In fact it probably won't work since an attempt to forward an already forwarded port will probably fail, which might explain why it keeps unchecking itself. If you have confirmed the forwards work properly using the connection test, you can go to settings/connection and set "Can accept incoming connections" to "yes".

Indeed, if you pass the connection test, after having set up router and firewall manually, you don't need UPnP at all. And if Shareaza continues to show that warning message about being firewalled, you can change the setting previously named by ailurophobe. Note however that if you change that setting, Shareaza will not notify you if there are problems with your setup in future and it is advised that you do a connection test once in a while to verify that everything is still as it is supposed to be.