Look under the options on your menu bar and try to find an option than disables a special extension for LimeWire (under the help menu, I think). This might stop your freezing. I'm sorry this is so vague. I don't have a Mac to test this out on, but I do recall someone solving the freezing problem by disabling an extension, which can be done with an extension manager or by using the option in the menu (version 1.7 and up). Does this help at all?

As for the connection thing, I'm not sure what's up. The problem seemed to be fixed a couple of days ago (problem with LimeWire's bootstrap server), but the Mac version may still need some help. If you do want to revert to version 1.6, go to:

http://limewire.gnutelliums.com/1.6b/

or

http://limewire.gnutelliums.com/1.6d/

:-)