Well, I'll just tell you my situation.

My ISP is meddling with my connection. I can't connect to anyone if THEIR listening port is 6346 or 6347. I ca't even ask them what they have. I know this is my ISP, because on another ISP it works normally.

I found out that the "browse host" gives me the port of the host, and only returns results if I can get a connection to them so that has effectively become my strategy. Search a query with lots of returns, ungroup, sort by location, and go down the list browsing hosts until I get returns, then look and see if a file I want is in the list.

Reminds me of the old ftps.

Strange however, that I get many more valid connections when I can force LimeWire to connect as a peer. Perhaps I just got very lucky two out of two times, but that seems unlikely.