Hi Joe and Birdy,

I was going to start a thread on this subject and try to get to the bottom of it all. I find browsing a host to be very useful...more of the same stuff I am interested in is usually there etc. I am a huge movie buff and wrestle with finding good clean copies of the stuff I want. There is so much trickery out there, from both the white hats (those who work for the movie companies to stop sharing) and the black hats (idiots that just want to annoy, spam, infect or gross us out) that it is hard to see the forrest for the trees.

So, back to Browsing A Host:

1 - CANNOT BROWSE/UNABLE TO BROWSE HOST: I found that if I have a lot of stuff downloading I will hit the ceiling of what my ISP will allow me to have (aka Bandwidth shaping/capping)...with my ISP i am pretty well off, often hitting 200kb/s however, when I get to the very top of the bandwidth shaping window, it becomes hard to even do anything else, like visit another website. I think that this could have someting to do with it. I will do some checking around and some experiments and see what I can find out.

2 - CAN BROWSE TO THE HOST BUT NO FILES SHOW: In this instance I get there (to the host) but I do not see a pop-up that says "cannot browse host, I just get a blank file listing. Any ideas on this?? Again, could this be because I am at the top of the Bandwidth Window?

Birdy, I did try adding Chat - don't see any changes yet, perhaps a shutdown and relaunch of Limewire.

NOTE TO OTHER USERS: IF YOU ARE HAVING THE SAME PROBLEMS AND CAN HELP TO MAKE THIS THREAD INTO A PLACE FOR ANSWERS ON THIS SUBJECT, PLEASE ADD YOUR COMMENTS AND FINDINGS. Thanks - April - A Girl with a Mind for Computers and a Bod for Sin ;-) hehehe

Update: Feb 18/07 - I set up at another location on a different provider. Pretty much all the configs are the same and yet here I can get to almost anyone (any host) who allows host browsing. Still not sure why there is any difference; I get through with no "blank host lists" at all with this 2nd provider. Meanwhile, at home I have basically given up even trying...although once in a long while I do see a listing there too. I can't find any feature in the software to allow browsing a host to work (or not work). I think it is a firewall thing for the browse/no browse pop-up window thing and a filewall thing at the provider level when we get there but see a blank listing. In the end, I don't think there is much we can do to fix it.