Hi everyone,

You are probably all barking up the wrong tree updating Java and fiddling with firewalls (if the problem is that LW used to work and now it doesn't).

The problem is to do with the Gnutella Web Cache (GWebCache) - basically this is a bunch of web servers which have a persistent memory of other peers on the network - without it everyone would be blindly trying all machines on the internet on all ports until it found someone to pair with.

Somehow this has got out of date in LimeWire and you can't set it to something new in the LimeWire preferences.

This is how I fixed it on my Mac - I have no idea about XP...

1. Quit LimeWire completely

2. Find LimeWire's gnutella config file and move it somewhere else e.g. on Mac rename ~/Library/Preferences/LimeWire/gnutella.net
to ~/Library/Preferences/LimeWire/gnutella.net.old

3. go here Gnutella web cache scan report and copy a high ranking GWebCache URL into your copy buffer (e.g. Skulls! Multi-Network WebCache 0.2.8) (note: use the URL of that link, not the underlined text)

4. Create a new file called ~/Library/Preferences/LimeWire/gnutella.net containing the GWebCache URL (e.g.
Skulls! Multi-Network WebCache 0.2.8) and nothing else (well maybe a newline after it)

5. Start LimeWire again
(I had to quit and restart LW one more time before I could type in the search box for some reason)

note that you may have broken some other config (e.g. firewall setting) while trying to get LW to work.

Someone should post this as sticky (with Windows instructions) if it helps a lot of people.