Don't know what the next best thing to Limewire is.

For torrents I would recommend BitComet. Works quite well. I have tried it a few times but mainly stick with Limewire.

Do you by any chance have the installer for the previous version. You could try to reinstall that instead. Maybe it still works great.

That's how I fixed it at first, until it really pissed me off that I couldn't upgrade Was running 4.9.37Pro before

BTW: Just checked my taskmanager

Limewire.exe 1-3%
3 Downloads 20 Hosts 100+ KB/s
5 Uploads 30-45 KB/s

That's probably what it's suppose to look like. Even less than with 4.9.37