ok what i gather is that they are currently making major changes to gnucleus to reduce network management traffic (overhead - pings, pongs etc.) the upside is that this is working, and downside is that children (child nodes, that's most people) can't see very well, you have to trust the network. it's very important that your 3 ultrapeer connections are to good ultrapeers, for example i currently have 100 children which might be average i don't know, but i could have none or up to 400 (by default, and the max is 1500). What's tempting is to increase your number of connections, while that may help you get more results, you are actually reducing network density overall, so three is probably best. just disconnect any that don't seem to be doing much (you can look at statistics, but not sure how to interpret that yet). this is not easy for beginners to use, but what i find is that it suddenly starts working well. and my upload slots are always full so something is working right eh