bearshare is safer than limewire, but with any program like that you can get viruses, if your dumb about downloading stuff. if you see a song you wanna download and its only 513,122 bytes, its probably a virus, jsut use your head, but i have never gotten anything bad from bearshare that norton didnt detected, and a friend of mine used limewire and downloaded a virus that detroyed his computer. easy way to never get a virus. get a mac