Howdy e,

Welcome to the Gnutella forums!

fyi: Limewire is a peer-to-peer file-sharing program that enables users to share files via the Gnutella network. You use LW to search other users' computers to see what content they are sharing. It's a great way to share movies, music, etc with others.

LW was officially shut down in the US and is now going the way of Napster. The good news is that there are pirate copies of LW available free (links can be found on this forum). You really ought to check it out (there's nothing illegal with using a pirate copy of LW).

Players: I believe many will agree with me that WMP and QuickTime are both quite bloated. There is a QT alternative available free from places like download. com, though I haven't had a need for a QT player for quite awhile.
I haven't gotten rid of WMP, (don't know why), but I disabled it's ability to automatically connect to the internet (don't know what it sends to Microsoft, and I want to make sure that it can't be used by a trojan). To organize your music collection, download cover art, and edit tags, there are quite a few free apps available. MediaMonkey comes to mind, but I know there are others that I thought were even better.

I play everything with VLC. No need for additional CODECs that I've found so far (and I watch a Lot of movies!). For those times when I just want to play a few songs I use 1by1 (free, small, & low overhead).

Before you go removing any software based upon my recommendations, I suggest you wait until others have had a chance to respond, just in case I am in error about something. While you wait, you might find this interesting: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/downlo...ad-issues.html