If you have a lot of incompletes & shares, it can extend connection time. Let's hope this was what was caused the extended connection time.

Another thing you can do is go to preferences, Connections I think it is & disable automatically connect. Then next time you open LW, let it settle for 10+ mins & then go to File menu -> Connect.

Tip: Purge the Downloads Queue! (click on blue link) can help here too.