Sure. LW Pro's advantages are limited. Viruses? Same as you can get with Basic, depends on your own skills at choosing the right or wrong files to download, has nothing whatsoever to do with using Pro. LW Basic connects you to 3 ultrapeers, Pro to 5 which gives better search results for the rarer harder to find files. Will not make any difference to finding common files. LW Basic connects up to 8 hosts per file to download from. LW Pro from 10 which arguably should give faster overall speeds depending of course on your hosts. Hosts is the keyword!!! If you are downloading from a dial up user, then obviously you are not going to get good speeds. Especially if from several of them. Keep in mind also, some people who share files will be uploading to several people so their upload slots might be too busy for you, else their bandwidth is mostly used up for those others uploading from them.

If you have doubts about Pro then stick with Basic. The improvements are marginal. It does not help you connect better. It does not give dramatic improvements. However if you are an experienced LW user & are experienced user at searching, then you will see the improvements.

If you have firewall issues, then LW Pro will not fix them. That's a problem at your end.

Here's an example of what can be obtained using Pro .. ie: notice the downloading from 10 hosts per file .. gives that bit extra http://www.gnutellaforums.com/limewi...tml#post330034. Example image was taken last year using LW 4.16. I still use LW 4.16 & it can still be obtained. If you wish to know about it just ask. It was superior to LW 4.18. However, great results can also be obtained from LW 5.