My experience does not match yours. I have found no correlation between the number of stars and hosts and my ability to download. I have had one star modems download steadily while three connected hosts stalled at 2% until they lost connection. On my searches, I rarely find more than about one hundred hits. I frequently fail to find any (and we are not talking about minor names — even global searches on generalised key words like "rock" only tend to hit around the 150 mark on a good day). Sequential searches made seconds apart with the same key words will often find completely different groups of hits but, rarely, in real numbers. I can take hours for a file to download (and this would be a typical 3/4mb file). The frustration is that I watch people consistently suck up my files at speeds I never achieve — when they actually connect, that is. Upload connection is as capricious as download. Take the last few hours as an example. I had 176 uploads. 49 were 100% complete but 72 failed at less than 5%. And while we are into statistics (which I keep, poor sad fellow that I am) my download success rate is less than 5%. Yes, that's right. Less than 5% of the files that I connect to end up as 100% downloads. Limewire is a system requiring create patience.