great news!
fabion got to the bottom of the problem for me, so thanks alot.
i needed to set up port forwarding on the machine i use limewire on. in order to this i had to setup a static ip. after loads of fiddling about i got it setup and limewire is working even better now and i can browse the internet too. here is the link fabion supplied for me.
http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm
this has loads of routers on and btvoyager 2100 was on it.
i'm currently using pipex' dns, but hopefully bt will get back to me with their name servers.
thanks again fabion and everyone for their help. hope this post sorts the problem out for others in the future.