Okay guys, I know you are all working hard on making Limewire a great program for us all, and believe me I appreciate it or I wouldn’t have gone Pro. But it’s hard to say if 2.5.3 is more or less buggy that 2.4, which was differently buggy but also so bad I had to stop using it until 2.5 came out because 2.4 could never complete indexing my 10,000 shares without crashing completely and trashing my system (see below). Here is my laundry list of bugs and issues. I would apreciate any feedback or solutions.

System info: G4 dual GHz processor with 1.5 GB ram, OS X.1.5, Limewire Pro 2.5.3

Limewire runs great for a few minutes (usually — sometimes even for hours) and then begins to MASSIVELY bog and slow, giving a spinning beachball for 3 to 10 seconds at ANY request (switch tabs, click in a text entry field, hit return to do a search, sort downloads by progress, anything). This is true even when Limewire is the only app running. According to Process Viewer, Limewire frequently demands over 100% of the CPU -- that’s a dual gigahertz of cpu, friends, and that’s insanity. No way can it need 2GHz to sort a few downloads by completion % or allow me to type text into a search field, but it thinks it does. No other program demands so much -- not even all of Office X running simultaneously with Photoshp and a Bryce render, but Limewire running alone does so.

Limewire is a GUI nightmare. The program’s GUI is great in and of itself, but once it starts bogging it causes massive GUI problems throughout my system. First Limewire’s own window starts misbehaving — blanking out sections, especially the downloads section, dragging very sluggishly — and then the problem spreads. All other app’s windows become split, slashed with blank areas, infiltrated by pieces of the Limewire window which is beneath them (like a 1” square of the bottom left corner of the Limewire window with the green dot showing I’m connected showing up in my Explorer window, as just one example), trailed by multiple ghosts of past locations, covered with dock ghosts, and quickly unreadable as portions of multiple windows in multiple locations intersect each other. I had to dock Limewire just to write this because I couldn’t see my Explorer window any more, at least not enough of it. It’s a major GUI nightmare, and none of these issues ever, ever, ever occur except when Limewire is running and bogging.

Limewire always eventually crashes within 0 to 24 hours of launch, meaning that I have to restart. I can never run it over night, as it universally hard crashes — I’d like to leave my shares up at night (I have a cable connection, so they’d be available to others), but I’ve never been able to do so. But don’t get me wrong — it crashes all day, too, I’m just there to restart it again. Sometimes when Limewire goes down I can force quit it, but eventually it takes the whole system down (eventually as in at least once a day, usually much more). Most of the time when I do restart, it has trashed my OS X startup disk, causing me to get the ?[Folder Icon] and a jump to my OS 9.2 disk, from which I then have to run Disk First Aid and Tech Tool Pro to resolve the various Master Directory Block corruptions, B-Tree Header errors, and Volume Header errors that a crashing Limewire apparently creates. I blame Limewire because I run a lot of software on this machine but only after a Limewire crash does my OS X disk become unusable until repaired. I don’t know why or what Limewire is doing in there, but it’s nasty and clawing up my system. Just fyi, I maintain directories, defrag disks, and do general maintenance on my system at least weekly, so we are not talking about a fragged and ill-maintained computer here. In fact, Limewire causes such massive file fragmentation on the disk I use for downloads that it is the main reason I began weekly optimization.

In Limewire 2.4 I never had any problems with downloads showing as completed and going to the proper folder I selected when (and only when) they were complete. Now sometimes when a file has completed downloading, the download status changes to “Downloading from 0 hosts” (rather than “complete”). However, the file size shows the file to be complete, and as far as I can determine the file is in fact complete. To remove it from the downloads window I have to choose “kill download” rather than “clear inactive” because Limewire thinks the file is incomplete and hence still active. Other downloads complete normally. In addition, now some files are moved to my downloads folder which did not in fact complete downloading (i.e. Limewire’s bogged window shows them as incomplete, the file size downloaded is MUCH smaller than the file size reported as being downloaded, the file contains only a fraction of the data, and in one case the file still had the T-xxxx header of an incomplete file in front of it, yet was moved from incomplete to the downloads folder anyway and the download stopped).

The Browse Host feature is never ever available, but rather always dimmed out no matter how many hosts I click on. Is this feature supposed to be working or is it a teaser of things to come?

Okay, that’s it. I hope these problems can be resolved. I want to keep using and supporting Limewire, but I can only stand to give up so much functionality on my computer in order to do so.