* For either LW or FW, continually defragmenting your drives is very important if you are a windows user (does not apply to mac osx users.)

* High numbers of Shares or incomplete files also contributes to slugginess. On mac OSX sharing over 2,000 files is not wise with OSX's poorer quality of Java & its poor memory & Virtual memory handling. Which includes memory leaks. For windows, making sure you have the best Java that suits your system & either of FW or LW are very important (sometimes one release of Java doesn't behave well, so updating or backdating the version can help solve a no. of issues.) Neither LW or FW seem to be able to handle external drives very well in my experience (though that might only be me, I have heard similar from some others.) See Tip: Purge the Downloads Queue! about reducing incompletes. In my experience, a large no. of incompletes has a similar effect as shares.

* Some methods of reducing drag on FW/LW: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/connec...tml#post129388

* After opening FW/LW wait 10 to 20 mins or longer before using. Let it settle down 1st.

* Don't download too many files at one time, LW/FW may have some problems connecting to all at the one time (depends on your connection & free slots & bandwidth, etc. also) & cause them to become queued. Perhaps the non-immediate connection will result in them not connecting at all. Thus need to cancel & reselect or re-search for sources.

* Making sure you have plenty of RAM and HDD space. Less than 25% free space remaining of a HDD will slow it down & thus slow down programs attempting to write to it. Of course fragmentation also affects the drive. Consider choosing a different drive to download & share from instead of the C:\ drive where the system is. I do this on both mac & windows.

* Oh & almost forgot .. some versions of LW/FW don't behave well on some people's systems. Consider trying a different version.

I'm sure some other people may have other suggestions. These are the ones I could think of at the time.