I've been using LimeWire 2.8.5 Pro for a few days now and it looks like there are a lot of issues with this version; if somebody has similar experiences or knows a solution to some of the issues, pls. post here to get some pressure to get things fixed.

I'm using a ADSL connection, W2k up to the latest service level, PIII-700MHz with 512 Mb RAM. A few Gb of diskspace available.

1. Very instable downloads AND uploads

The connections seem to get constantly lost. When I start downloading a file (assuming the download starts) the speed drops until it becomes 0, and the status column indicates downloading from 0 hosts. For a number of times, the download will reconnect (at the initial speed) and the whole cycle starts over again. The download host is always the same - i.e. has the same ip address. When there are multiple hosts to download the file, both of them have the same behaviour.

2. Limewire crashes

I've had several occasions the last 2-3 days where the software crashes and LimeWire asks me to send a bug report. It claims it can continue, but at least the GUI seems to hang.
After forwarding one of the bugs to limewire, I get a notification that 2.8.5 is a "buggy version of LimeWire that requires change. Please visit the LimeWire download page and switch to the current version. This may involve a rollback to version 2.7.13" unquote. Note that the pro download pages only contain 2.8.5...

3. Can not move file to library

There are a lot of posts about this problem, and a lot of the files I tried to download are stuck with this problem. It also happens with files that are not completely downloaded yet (so why is it trying to move the software to the library in the first place??). The filenames do not contain 'illegal' characters - as a proof, the same file can happily be copied from a dos-prompt. I guess it has to do with the (incomplete) file still being locked by a download process??

4. Slower downloads

I know from some of the other replies that the last version has a new and improved download capability, but the downloads are a lot slower in the last version. I know that performance is related to the overall state of the network, but statistics start to be on my side if I look at the download performance over the last days...

Looking at these 4 points, and keeping in mind the purpose why the product LimeWire exists, a lot of people could draw the conclusion that it is time to swap p2p software provider. However, some of the latest features are really good and it looks like this piece of software is heading in the right direction in terms of functionality (hence why I became a pro user...), but this kind of issues will have to disappear in the very near future.

If more details are needed about the problems, feel free to drop me a mail or reply to this message.

Werner.