okay here is the deal, if you click on the nodes tab you will see that some nodes have Test or Check in the Type column, and they disappear very quickly, don't worry about that, read the FAQ again to find out what those are. Other nodes are Sleep, but there are 2 types of Sleep, the grey ones haven't been tested for connectivity yet, the white ones have been tested and can be connected to to donwload or upload at any time. Simply put for both Share and Winny if you see that there is some uploading/downloading going on (in the status bar) it means everything is ok, if both ul/dl stay at 0kb for a while then the programs are not connecting at all.