Have you looked at "About this Computer" under the apple menu? Because I was noticing similar issues today, running version 1.8c under OS 9.2.2, and was astonished to find that Limewire was taking up over 40 megs of RAM, more than my OS!

In the "memory" tab of the program info, it says its minimum size is about 2800K. I set it to a minimum of 3000 and a preferred size of 4000. And yet when I run it - poof, it's huge! Given that, no wonder it runs slowly, doesn't draw the screen properly, etc.

I can't imagine that this isn't some kind of serious bug. Any program that hogs more memory than MS Word should be ashamed of itself.