Rather than totally confuse you when your situation might be different, I had better just explain what happened to me and to neo bird and why I think it did.

First of all, here is a letter I wrote to him during the research of my problem and it also caused him to find his missing files

Begin copy: When you have limewire open.... click on tools/options and look at the tab that says, automatically put saved files into this folder....

When we downloaded the product, by default, it sent them into the "shared" folder that limewire provides...

But if you so much as click on Windows media player , ( and probably other proprietary music programs too) It can take this over and change it to something similar to the following

This was the case for me because I have Windows XP Pro .. but might be different for you...... C:\Documents and settings\username\shared

Yours might be C:\My documents my music....

The way I found my "disappearing songs" was this way: After I downloaded one and watched it completely so that I knew it had "finished"..... (and of course the number being shared did not grow by one..)

I remembered the artist and title of the song. ( It's better if you download a song that has a wierd name, maybe)

anyway.. then I closed up limewire... restarted my computer...

Then went to the windows Find feature.... In XP it is now called search.. In 98/ 98SE you would go start/find/ files and folder... bla bla

anyway... I entered the title of the song I had just downloaded..... - Exactly like it was titled -

and voila..... It found it .. in the above mentioned path in my computer.

So I navigated to that folder in windows explorer and guess what..... All of the rest of the missing songs were in there too.

Try this...... Let me know what happens in your case...
End of copy and paste:

Since that time I have done some more research. I can’t speak for any other programs, but in my case, in Windows XP pro, Windows Media Player, ( and this should be illegal) has the power to permanently change the settings of other 3rd party applications.

I had read about this in an XP manual, and read that it was one of the prices that we pay for the stability of XP. In order to make XP more stabile than past Operating systems, (The end of .dll hell) Can you remember when we would download a new program or application and there would be a conflict and our computer would freeze? Well XP is much for stabile because it does not allow these “conflicts” to happen. In preventing them, somehow, Windows overrides the settings of some 3rd party applications. I am not nearly techy enough to know How it does it nor how to prevent it. I am almost afraid of attempting to do so.

I did attempt to try to reset the default folder for “items to be shared in limewire” back to the original folder which limewire had used by default. Because limewire was new and I had no clue this would ever happen, I neglected to even look up, much less write down that exact path name.

Since some songs are “complete” and some are not, It cant be C:\program files\limewire\ shared… because if you use that, the incompletes would go in there…. And you can’t use C:\program files\incomplete… because the “completed items” would go to the incomplete folder.

I asked for the path from gnutella forums but no one answered me. So I tried to change it to C:\programs\limewire to see what happened.

What happened is that Limewire “broke” and gave me a big error message and would not open for me.

At that point, in frustration and also because my firewall was getting a lot of strange hits, and because I was worried about what all is really being shared, I reluctantly eliminated limewire (and all limeshop components) from my system and downloaded WinMX. Which works okay ( you can’t search by Genre) but the point is --- I liked limewire, despite it’s current bugs and I hated that I had to do that.

I want to be able to have and use limewire. I am given to understand this latest version is buggy but they are recommending using an older version until they come out with a fix for the bugs.

I know that if this thread, and especially this post, could be brought to the attention of the people that make Limewire --- They could tell us exactly how we need to have our settings in Limewire and Windows Media player library.. in order that they can co-exist happily and the wrong files are not shared as well.

In my case, I opened up Windows media player for the first time, “after I had downloaded limewire”. So in setting it up, I may have brought on this mess. This was also the case for neo bird, I believe.

It may very well be that if you have Windows media player set up first, and “then” install Limewire (using defaults) , there would not be a problem. You could just go into your “windows media player” and add one folder to the folders that the library monitors for new songs…

You would do this by choosing/ tools/ options/ media library/ then click “monitor folders” and add the following folder.

C:\program files\limewire\shared. In this way, you would get the benefit of having all your complete songs in the library (not incompletes) and ---- hopefully --- all the songs downloaded with limewire would stay in limewire to be shared with others.

I don’t know if that will work. I think it might. I am tempted to try this next. …but I really don’t want the limeshop stuff and am hesitant to fork out the $9 until I know that they do get their bugs worked out.

If anyone else who is having this problem, tries this and it works or even doesn’t, please let me know.

And FOR GODS SAKES IF SOMEONE WHO IS TECHNICALLY SKILLED ( such as the makers? ) WITH THE LIMEWIRE PROGRAM SEES THIS,,,,,,, please come help and tell us what to do.

Windows media player, despite the fact that it belongs to you know who, allows us to organize “all” our music in ways as to create great playlists and CD’s. It would be really nice if limewire and it could happily coexist on the same computer with no worries about the wrong files being shared. Such as private ones.

At this point I doubt in anyone has read down this far, If you have, I salute you. Once I get my finger in a problem I just can’t seem to let it go. So I will keep watching the thread in the hopes that a magic solution may appear because I do like both the concept of limewire, and limewire itself. If these problems could be overcome. I would happily support and pay for the program.

silky