I'm pretty sure the client only opens 8 connections normally?

Try running with -noupnp?

It will not make more than 8 outgoing connections, but unless you supply -nolisten, it will listen for incoming connections independently. Maybe you just want to use -nolisten?

Wow, wow wow.  Hold on there.  UPnP has nothing to do with this.  First of all, to answer your original question, you can simply use -maxconnections=XX to limit max connections (default is 125), this has been in the client for quite some time. 
-noupnp actually ends up working the same way as -nolisten in that with UPnP enabled (which it is not, by default, unless you built yourself with USE_UPNP=1) your router will forward your connections properly allowing you to get more than 8 by accepting incoming connections.  -nolisten will end up doing the same thing by rejecting incoming connections.  What you should do is leave UPnP on (and/or forward the ports manually) and limit your connections to something that works for you, helping the network which has recently become very hard to bootstrap and make initial connections due to the massive number of people running nodes which do not accept incoming connections and/or do not have their ports forwarded properly.

Hmmm...

Too bad that this doesn't show up when i do # bitcoin --help.
Otherwise i wouldn't start this topic.


Weird. I'm using the pre-built bitcoin binary version 0.3.20. Is it built with UPnP support then ?
If not, then how disabling UPnP could have fixed it ?


Why should disabling UPnP make the client reject connections ? This is weird. Shouldn't this be considered a bug ?


I have forwarded the ports manually... I said i have DMZ set up.
Also, UPnP is disabled on my router anyway (i consider it to be unnecessary security risk), so enabling or disabling UPnP should have no effect whatsoever.