This is basically the same crap I reported to LimeWire at their bug-reporting e-mail address:
I'm using the MacOS X version of LimeWire Pro 2.3.2. Yes, I actually paid money for LimeWire. I feel the application has been abysmal since about version 2.2. Probably the most useful version was 1.7, although 2.0-2.1 were pretty good.
(1) Ever since 2.2.x, LimeWire won't stay connected to any one host for more than a minute. It becomes almost impossible for me to search this way... make that totally impossible. I haven't had a search come back successfully in I don't know how long.
(2) Your search mechanism used to be really simple. With 2.3.x, I can't figure out how to get the "Audio" file type searches to work.. no matter how many or how few boxes I fill in, the criteria never seem to be complete enough for me to click "search" and start searching for something. What's up with this? I mean, if you leave a box empty, it should be the same as wildcarding that field to allow any match. I should be able to just enter a song title or an artist, and no other information, and the application should just handle it OK. But that's not what happens. No search ever gets started in 2.3! Furthermore, this new interface is completely undocumented. Even in 2.2, the search for audio files seems to be broken. (Hey, guys, you wouldn't happen to have any of the 2.1 installers left around, would you?)
(3) LimeWire 2.3.x has some kind of really broken handling for display. Windows that should pop up in front of LimeWire somehow get hosed up and don't display properly -- the LimeWire window tries to stay in front of everything else, but in a half-assed fashion. In many cases, display corruption occurs, and the only solution is to click back and forth between the LimeWire window and the window of another application. How the hell can you guys be screwing the OS up this badly? Even 2.2 didn't behave this way. Must be all the new ridiculous eye candy you people stuck in the app.
(4) Ever since the transition to 2.X, the LimeWire installers keep blowing away my old settings every time I try to upgrade to a new version of LimeWire. I hate having to set the application up again and again every time I install a new point release. The settings should be preserved between installations.
(5) Your setup wizard is brain damaged. If I let it search my hard drive for files, it shows some directories that contain files that can be shared (but never finds them all), and the ones that I select with checkboxes are never the ones that actually wind up in the "Sharing" preferences. I always have to change what directories are listed in there. Geez, guys, I've been writing Java code for over 3 years, and I can't imagine what the hell you people are screwing up so severely! You iterate over a damned list and check a boolean for each member in the list, right? Right? How hard is that?
So, these are my major complaints. You people have taken a clever and useful Gnutella client, and totally ruined it through feeping creaturism. Things were not great after the introduction to Ultrapeer, but at least the app was still useful, but after the 2.1 LimeWire, things just went downhill. Why oh why did I ever upgrade?
The searching mechanism is so hopelessly broken AND UNDOCUMENTED, that it is useless. I might as well not be running your software. I have searched all over your web site, in your FAQs, your supposed help documents, your support sites, but nobody has explained how searching for files of type "Audio" is supposed to work. I can launch a search for "Any Type," but that doesn't seem to ever return results now. It's really a damned shame.
Sincerely,
Robert Poole
lionlad@qwest.net tarquinaz@mac.com