Just my 2 cent, and I am not sure is totally relevant, but I had this kind of behaviour:
First of all, kad contacts list gone empty (I do not know why).
It should try to connect using the local ed2k contacts as sources, but after some hours it disconnect and don't try again to reconnect
So I tried, while aMuled was running, to replace nodes.dat with a fresh new one downloaded with a wget while in the .aMule dir, then I used aMuleGUI/Win32 to trigger the "Connect". It then connected and kept connected for days:
2006-01-13 11:07:17: Read 0 Kad contacts
2006-01-13 11:07:17: Kad started.
2006-01-13 11:07:27: Kad stopped.
2006-01-13 11:07:27: Connected to Kad (firewalled)
2006-01-13 11:08:50: Connected to Kad (ok)
2006-01-13 13:48:15: Disconnected from Kad
--- Manually overwritten nodes.dat
2006-01-16 08:59:01: New external connection accepted
2006-01-16 08:59:01: Connecting client: amule-remote 0x0001
2006-01-16 08:59:01: Access granted.
2006-01-16 08:59:12: Read 185 Kad contacts
2006-01-16 08:59:12: Kad started.
--- Kad was on until I reboot on
2006-01-24 09:07:40
When I rebooted, aMuled readed only 93 Kad contacts out of the 185 I had when I substituted the nodes.dat... I suppose the problem is that keeping this behaviour it does soon go out of "live" contacts and stop trying to reconnect (not having nodes to boot from).
Of course there are no "Static" servers on Kad to boot from, but looks like it prune them from the list much more faster than it adds them (it adds them, right?)
Hope this would be of help troubleshoting...