Not ridiculous if they have only allowed a small upld bandwidth or are sharing b/w too many people. T1 & T3 are potentially very fast conncetions but if they only allow a small upld bandwidth then that explains how cable/dsl, etc. can be even better to dwnld from sometimes.

You seem to have lots & lots of firewalls affecting your connection. For a start, SP2 limits the no. of simultaneous connections. See Verdyp's comments here: This post & the following one by Verdyp.

You should double-check your configuration of your XP firewall to give both Java & LW full & not partial access: http://www.limewire.com/english/content/firewalls.shtml (instructions)

What model no. of Linksys router do you have? Many Linksys router modems use a NAT firewall & should be port forwarded to allow LW full access.

Update your Java: Java 1.5 (take the JRE)

Leave LW on for up to 30 mins & do this test: Bug Report instructions & sample image Is it True/False?