OK. Thanks. I'll spend some time collecting this information and will post back here.

Oh, can you answer one question?

I did the following as instructed in a post:

"Delete the LW Preferences folder called limewire (whilst LW is closed!)"

Now if I do a search for ".limewire", I get no results. It's not even in my Recycle Bin.

What implications does the deletion of this file have and how come there is no recreation of the folder despite uninstalling and reinstalling?