Hey mykeel,
Sorry nobody's got back to you sooner...sometimes takes a while.

Have you found out whether your router supports UPnP? If it does, enable it & use the UPnP option on LW's firewall config page & apply to save the change.

I don't know why you had so much trouble with port forwarding & why you weren't able to change LW's listening port

Turn on your XP firewall & configure it to allow LW
Firewall setup

Did you try those other tips in my first post about reducing the drag caused by LW? You could also see whether using Java 1.6 makes any difference. Use the offline JRE installer here & remove your current Java version before you install the new one.
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp

Otherwise...I'm a bit stumped