forgot to say thanks for the advice so far stief - you seem to know more than use mere mortals. or perhaps you read the manual, ehem,

just on the point of limewire not being able to find a file that you have requested because the person sharing the file has logged back into the system and is now on a different IP address that his isp randomly assigned to him

Surely this cant be the case??

I mean it would be a really basic problem to fix if developping software

like when a user puts new files into their shared folder and hits refresh/update in limewire then the software would give each file a unique ID based on the name, no of bytes, file type etc and the ip address could be in there but not high in priority as a condition of finding the file ever again

if one finds a file based on the name surely Limewire is capable of finding it by name again

If its the case that Limewire finds the same file but at a different IP and isnt smart enough to dump the other file from the old ip and to see that the file on the new ip is the same and to then continue downloading it - then thats not a great situation.
Its impossible to know which incompletes fall into this category?

I know that if I have a file that is incomplete and have had it for months and decide to do a new search and click on a file with the same name to download, Limewire will warn me that I am downloading the file already

anyway to end this ramble I just think that a unique file id would mean that the change of ip for a bunch of shared files wouldnt matter - could that be possible? it would certainly then be based on a realistic understanding of the how the shared folders are existing and being used

the other annoying this is that some people have figured out how to take searches that people are doing and dynamically rename files that are actually their own ads

thre must be a way to stop this clogging things up?

I dont know how they end up being on so many peoples computers either. If you search for something really obscure and suddenly there are 47copies of a small graphics file which contains an advert??? the trick cant be renaming the files on other peoples computers? perhaps this ties into the unique file id topic

it would be great to be able to hold and extra key down when deleting a download and get it to delete the file and ref in the incomplete folder?