Your experience adds to my suspicion that there is some sort of DoS attack taking place in Gnutella these past several months. Since LimeWire offers so little diagnostic info, I haven't been able to prove or disprove anything, but I've definitely noticed a dropoff in network performance. I wouldn't be surprised if the RIAA or the movie industries was secretly paying some hackers to disrupt things.

The question is: what can be done to improve the Gnutella protocol/network to resist DoS attacks?