afisk

I was never set as an Ultrapeer so I'm sure that the problem is not related to that. The problem happened immediately the very first time I launched LW 2.7.13 - before I could even see the user interface - not to talk acting on my preferences.

I followed another workaround, i.e. launching LW directly from the terminal with the command:
java -jar LimeWire.jar

LW launched regularly and worked as fast as 2.7.9 was used to do.

Only drawback: the localized user interface sticked to the basic search window, i.e. selecting e.g. audio did not show the audio specific search fields (title, author, ...).

If this happened with 2.7.13 (and not only to myself, see other posts related to LW 2.7.13 high memory consumptions), this means that 2.7.13 and 2.7.9 were *not* the same.

Anyway, I switched to LW 2.8.0. This latter works fine again without any workaround.