Hey Steif:

Thanks again for your help. I decided to re-install my system software again and voila! it worked.
The only thing that I can pinpoint as a possible reason for my trouble is that I installed Norton Utilities. I don't know if there are any known bugs or issues with this software, but I have not installed it and everything seems back to normal.

I suspect that because Norton installs part of it's code on the operating system it does not allow the connection Limewire needs to boot up.

I trashed everything I could find related to Norton, but there was still some of it's code on my system because of a persistent pop-up message when I would start-up my machine. Only a re-install and archive could completely remove all of it's contents.

I wonder if this is an issue others are trying to figure out as well. Hopefully, this will help.