Interesting idea. Could be true. I believe there's some issue about songs bought thru iTUnes site having limited share-ability. But it's not something I understand very well. I thought that was where the deauthorising of the songs via iTunes advanced menu played a part .. but I don't know. Perhaps someone else can fill us in here.

Someone else on the forum is trialling the same concept to see if uninstalling iTunes makes a difference to results. They're using windows. Will wait & see.

Update on that ... does seem to have an effect for them (Fabion.) Once uninstalling iTunes & restarting LW their audio search results improved dramatically.

A note from rkapsi on this topic:

"iTunes is definitely not blocking LimeWire from sharing (I mean up- and downloading) files.

That would either mean there is a rudimentary Gnutella implementation in iTunes. A protocol analyzer like Ethereal (www.ethereal.com) would uncover such a component immediately. Or iTunes is using a similar technique like Virus scanners but that would break with every new LimeWire version.

And music files bought from the iTunes Music Store are DRM protected. LimeWire doesn't share them anyway out-of-the-box - the .m4p extension is not the shared files list."