Do this test to help determine if your firewall is on or off or configured properly: Bug Report instructions & sample image Is the result True/False? If False then something is at least partially blocking LW. Be that a softw firewall or a modem/router.

You can always close LW & reopen if you feel the connections aren't behaving very well.

Also browsing the hosts, or re-searching can find more sources or liven them up. If you have the search results up then you can stop it, then re-select to downld. All these things can help to freshen up downld speeds. More tips here: See the following link & follow all the off-shoot links to find hints & extra skills to solve your problem: To continue files downlding (click on link)

As far as LW crashing on OSX, well OSX's Java is stuck at 1.4.2 which is not highly efficient. Java 1.5 has only become available for OS 10.4.x users. Hmph! Typical apple! But some tips to stop LW crashing are: close windows you don't need open (eg: connection & library windows), hide LW in the dock when not in front of comp, set uplds & downlds to auto-clear, close off very old search results, don't resume too many files at once, reduce shared/incomplete files or both, reduce upld & downld speeds, disable ultrapeer capabilities.