thar she blows!
thanks to the thread by panzer (here ) i got it working...
looks like there is something in the new limewire that doesnt like norton, i disabled it, and went for windows firewall, it all loaded fine, restarted, put norton back on and everythings working fine..
i remember this happened with slsk a while ago, there was a problem with norton as it kept auto-blocking slsk... but it was fixed somehow in the next release. hmmm.

thanks for the help.

also,, on a side note..
is edonkey now pay only.. i used to have overnet aaaages ago, and now it seems you have to buy edonkey? or have i just missed the free version link?