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Has anyone else noticed that bittornado stays yellow only if the connections in the advanced screen are local, whereas it goes green as soon as there's a remote one. Does anyone know y this is and how to solve it, cos when it's green the download speed is great, but when yellow it's very slow. Please help anyone.

The answer to this is interesting, actually. That's all the green light does, is show there's been an incoming connection.

Now, trackers are SUPPOSED to contact the client back, in order to check if there's an open port; and if so, it'll add that peer to the list of clients that are addressable. When other peers connect, it then gives out peer data from this list. If you're connecting to a tracker that follows this spec, you should get a green light very quickly because the client detects the tracker connecting.

Some tracker implementations don't follow this spec, for varying reasons. Sometimes admins shut off the NAT check feature in an attempt to save bandwidth or memory; this is usually a bad idea, especially with the latest tracker versions. In this case, the status light stays yellow for a while, since the tracker doesn't immediately trip it. It also means that the tracker is giving out addresses for all the peers whether they're connectable or not. And THIS means that peers waste a lot of time trying to connect to other peers which can't accept connections, which slows the whole connection process down. That's why you're experiencing bad performance on torrents that don't quickly go green.

Thanks alot for that Shadow, it all makes sense now.

The pieces fall together....