Greetings, OP again.

I did exactly what you suggested: added an environment variable JAVA_HOME for my jre directory (I don't have the sdk) and made sure it was in my path. LimeWire still doesn't work.

I don't see why the change you suggested would have worked anyway, since I can still run LimeWire 2.4 manually with the java command; it just produces a million error messages about missing files and fonts (which were presumably supposed to be bundled in the tarball). If LimeWire really couldn't find Java or the standard libraries, it probably wouldn't have started up at all.

Have you or anyone else actually gotten the 2.4 tarball to work?