Hi Larigot,
Peerguardian seems to be migrating their lists atm, so they will probably be down for another while yet.
If you're using the patch from
www.winmxgroup.com however you don't need PG anymore - unless you're using other p2p software as well of course
If you still prefer running PG2 try using it with our
Blocklist, Instructions on how to add it are
here.
If you can connect and your uploads/downloads are fine I'd say the port forwarding for winmx works and wouldn't touch it - why fix something that's not broken?
A proxy server is a server you would connect to that would then connect to winmx for you. Unless you can afford to pay for a good one that would be quite slow though, so not much use for the normal user. Socks4 and socks 5 are just different protocols here afaik.
The advantage would be that your connections wouldn't go directly, i.e. your IP would be hidden. But like I said the performance sucks