Your best option is to stop shutting it down so often. When you stay online permanently
it always has a full list of thousands of good nodes to connect with. People will also be
able to find your shared files much more easily when you become a reliable source
instead of one that's always vanishing before or even during their downloads.

Closing it and reopening it doesn't help at all, though you might get that illusion. You can
disconnect and reconnect without shutting it down if you enable the Hosts view and use
the controls in there.

If you're willing to change your system date to July 2005 when you start it, the beta
version is a good choice because you can switch it into ultrapeer mode whenever you
have connection problems. In that mode it connects to 26 peers instead of 2 and it will
always connect to about ten LimeWire peers alongside a bunch of .Bears