Here's something no one else commented on, that started with the beta 4.9.0 and persisted to 4.9.1.

If a lot of files end up "waiting for busy hosts", instead of all sitting showing that (as in every version I ever used before these betas), they keep jumping about between waiting and queued. Five of them seem to be waiting at any given time and the rest queued, but the number seems to sometimes be lower, especially if you have a file actually downloading by some miracle, or something is waiting in line.

Also, waiting in line seems to be a useless distinction from waiting for busy hosts. Maybe if the queue position actually decreased monotonically and then the file actually downloaded, it would be different, but as things stand it means exactly the same thing. The file will download whenever -- or never. It's as likely to go from position 3 to position 7, or to "busy", or even "awaiting sources" as it is to go to position 2 in my experience, just as an example.

The distinction between "need more sources" and "awaiting sources" seems equally meaningless. Both seem to mean the same thing: there's no host on the network right now with the file, at least within your horizon. The only differences whatsoever seem to be that a file you used "find sources" on will show "awaiting sources" but one you didn't will show "need more sources", and files that show "awaiting sources" won't do anything until you restart limewire -- they won't find more sources, they won't resume (sometimes they flicker to queued and then right back to awaiting sources, but that's it), and they won't do anything else either except take up space in the GUI. Why is this? It seems pointless. They should be resumable, or else find-sourcable, without having to restart Limewire first. I thought we were trying to encourage people to leave their clients running for a long time? Yet currently, doing so and continuing to try to get a file you want are mutually exclusive for no reason I can fathom.

As if that wasn't enough, even beta 4.9.1 still hasn't fixed the problem with downloads that hang at 100%, downloads that simply stop, downloads that suddenly change into busy signals instead of finishing, downloads that have insanely low throughputs (a few bits per second, I believe, is the record so far -- the file was less than 100K with an estimated time of arrival in the vicinity of 3 days), and downloads that keep on cycling between downloading, waiting for busy hosts, queued, and downloading, apparently at regular fractions of the file completed (e.g. 33 and then 67%, or 25, 50, and 75, or 20, 40, 60, and 80). What gives with these? The file should download so long as you and the remote host are both still online. And if the file stops downloading, but starts again in a very short time, it's fairly clear the remote host remained online the whole time, but for some reason the download did not continue the whole time.

And of course there are the files that you find, double click, watch download to 66% and then watch "awaiting sources". This shouldn't happen. If it could get two thirds of the file there's no reason it couldn't get the whole file, unless the other side genuinely went offline, which doesn't seem to be the case, since fairly often when I see this happen other files in the same series and presumably hosted on the same machine are busy, waiting in line, or even out-and-out downloading. A related phenomenon seems to be when you see a bunch of files you want that seem to be related, select them all for download, and get exactly three while the rest "need more sources". You find sources, get exactly three, and the rest await sources. Then you restart Limewire, get another three, and the rest "need more sources". And so on. It's as if Limewire decides that if a remote host will only send three files at a time (which is quite common, and Limewire's own default behavior) to the same downloader, that the others aren't busy but in fact have vanished entirely from the network. Searching for them finds them again, but again it gets three and decides the remainder have vanished from the network. It should treat them as busy, not nonexistent, and the paradoxical thing is that sometimes it does treat them as busy. The problem is compounded by the inability to find more sources for "awaiting sources" files, which makes you have to restart limewire every six files in cases like this. You end up spending more time watching limewire start up and watching it shut down than you do watching files actually downloading, and your own shared files become only sporadically available.

So the whole file status thing is basically broken as things currently stand. Waiting in line and busy mean the same thing. Need more sources and awaiting sources mean the same thing, and both mean that while limewire thinks there are no sources inside its horizon with the file, it may have mistakenly classed some as having no sources that actually have (busy) sources, and the file should really be showing the busy status.

I might add that 4.8.1 didn't have the problem of downloads hanging at 100% and that the betas haven't fixed an additional problem -- files sometimes become "busy" and get stuck that way until you resume them manually, instead of retrying automatically after a while, as evidenced when you waiting a few minutes and none of them download, then select them all and hit resume and watch half a dozen of them promptly download.