My iTunes connection has gone. I cannot access the Music Store, podcasts, the Gracenote CDDB, nothing. Yet all my other internet connections (Safari, Mail, limewire etc) work fine.

I will tell you how I had things set up and then explain what I did yesterday when the problem arose.

First, I must have checked 'Import downloads into iTunes?' but forgotten about it. So what I have been doing is dragging all my limewire downloads from /User/Shared/Shared to iTunes, then amending Title, Artist, etc as required. What I did notice was a folder in iTunes which limewire must have set up, called Limewire, but I never bothered to look in it.

Yesterday, I noticed that with all my tracks being in iTunes there was no need to keep duplicates (the original downloads from limewire) in /User/Shared/Shared so I trashed them. Then, back in iTunes, I looked in the Limewire playlist and all the tracks were still listed there (with track details as they had been in /User/Shared/Shared, not as I renamed them after dragging them into iTunes). If I tried to play any of these, I just got the ! to show that iTunes couldn't find them (not surprising, I'd just trashed them).

Some time after this, the same day, I got the iTunes connection problem and it's been there ever since. During the same time, I have had unlimited connection with limewire - 5 green bars all the time - where before I only got access during daytime weekdays. This may be coincidence, but the synchronicity is odd to say the least.

Have other limewire users had this problem with iTunes? I've posted this on the Apple discussion forums but no-one has an answer, except to point to some useful articles. I've read them and nothing stands out as being relevant to my problem. I have repaired permissions, restarted, reinstalled limewire, everything.

bottom line, it may not be a limewire problem, but it looks suspicious.