Shareaza

I am a newbie to Shareaza (but in no way a newbie to P2P).
I am running on Windows XP SP3 and have made the changes as posted in the FAQ thread. I used xp-antispy to change the connection limit.

I still find that my downloads are super-slow and most of the downloads don't do anything at all.

Once is a while it will kick up to 60K and then go down to about 10K-5k.
My connection is 10M bits so there is certainly plenty of bandwidth available.

Port forwarding is set up (I even checked up in the router to be sure).

So, what have I missed?

(I have over 1,000 files shared so I am definitely not a leecher)

This isn't like downloading some 3GB file from a cloud... A lot of the people you're connected to are on residential connections. Unless you're connected to A LOT of them, it can be painfully slow sometimes regardless of your connection and settings. This is likely THEM, not you. If you want to be sure, try downloading something through Shareaza that YOU KNOW should be quick, like a Torrent of some Linux distro that has at least a couple hundred seeds or grab something via HTTP from a site that you know will have more than enough bandwidth.

Rather not start using Shareaza for torrents. Some sites really don't like it.

How do I get one from an HTTP connection?

My downloads are not moving at all.

Been connected for over 2 hours and have managed to download a grand total of about 5MB.

Shows 3 G2 hubs
4 G1 Ultrapeers
eDonkey connected

Are those numbers reasonable?

Yes, those numbers are healthy.

Might you tell us the results of your connection test? (Can be found within the help menu.)

I noticed that some of them have a time written there. It counts down so I assume it is some time of timer.
When it goes down to zero nothing exciting happens.

I am talking about the "Transfers" window.

In the end it seems that patience is the name of the game.
Just left them running all day and some of them downloaded.

You should know that the longer you're waiting, the further you're moving threw the waiting queues of your download sources. Therefore a longer waiting time without interruption increases your probability of getting more of your files downloaded.