Shareaza

I have a particular file I'm trying to download. It shows 2 sources and isn't downloading very frequently or very fast. So I right click it and "find more sources". It switches from Pending to Searching, but a few minutes later it's back to Pending (and staying that way, even when other downloads show Searching), so for some reason "find more sources" will not "take" with this one particular file. It will with other files, many of which have sources and a couple of which even have over 10 sources (one with 15, one with 22, neither has made progress in weeks despite the fact that the latter has new sources found from time to time, having gone from 18 to 22 over the last two weeks -- seems Shareaza is only discovering sources that don't have any parts of the file I don't already have?).

How do I get it to search for more sources for this file, and to STAY searching, at least until it actually finds one?

P.S. When I first started typing this, I got as far as "I have a particular file" and then suddenly the form blanked itself and said "Your message contains too few characters". First of all, shouldn't it be up to the guy writing the message? If he can say what he has to say concisely, why should be be forced to be excessively verbose? Second, perhaps if your forum software hadn't jumped the gun and had waited for me to actually finish writing the post first before pronouncing its judgment, it would have liked the number of characters better!

Shareaza can likely only find two sources.

1. Make sure you pass Connection Test, its allow you to use firewalled sources.
2. Use all networks: Gnutella 2, Gnutella 1 and eDonkey.
3. Try "Find more sources" at other time of day and night.

The problem here is "find more sources" not properly taking effect at all, not sources being dropped.

Of course, it shouldn't drop sources that have only parts of the file that you have. Those sources may get more of the file and then share the new parts with you. In fact, with one of my other partial downloads this has been happening, and Shareaza has been retaining the source. It had 500MB of a 2GB file, which I got; then it started downloading from that source again and I saw it now had over 600MB. (Why my client doesn't seem to download from the other of that file's two sources, the one with the complete file, directly, is a mystery.)

And of course if there are sources with part of a file there must be a source somewhere with the whole file. Consider that the sources with part of the file must have gotten it from somewhere. It doesn't make sense that the file was "only partial" when it first appeared online. It could be that no source with the whole file is online at a particular moment in time, of course, but such a source does exist and may, indeed should eventually, reconnect in the future.

Yeah, it looks a bit different. There is a little grey zigzag icon displayed on top of the normal file type icon if the file seems to be incomplete...