there is definitely something wacky going on here...

reminds me of when I had installed a new hosts file, and it was wacked...did exactly the same thing....and it took me a week to figure out wtf was up...in my case, since the hosts file is directly associated with your OS, I had that symptom as soon as I booted up..cpu totally sucked dry, temps of the thing through the roof..took me a couple of days to figure out which system process was doing it, then a few more to remember I had installed that new hosts file...upon removal, things went back to normal...

hmmm..the only thing I can think of at this moment is that something deep in LW is totally corrupted...

when you did your uninstall, reinstall stuff, did you by any chance manually delete everything that was left?

like in the incompletes folder, totally deleting said folder?

and in program files deleting the entire LW folder?

maybe even doing a search in your registry and totally removing ALL traces of LW?

and as noted, changing the name of your downloads and shared folders so that upon a new install, they are not associated with LW at that point...

basically I think you need to really wipe your system clean of any traces of LW ever having been there, starting with a totally clean slate and a totally empty shared/download folder