When this happened to me, I tracked it down to a permissions problem. LimeWire will not offer to search on esoteric fields, nor will it display bitrates or gather metadata from shared files, unless it has permission to write various files in /Applications/LimeWire/lib. If you have multiple users and installed with one but are running with another, or if you tried to "lock down" the permissions on the LimeWire application directory, you may run into this problem.

If you install LimeWire as the user you will run it as, you shouldn't have a problem.

The developers are aware of this problem and have said that it will be fixed. Those files that go in the lib directory really belong with limewire.props, which is stored in ~/Library/Preferences/LimeWire.

Mark
2.8.4/10.2.3/iMac 800MHz