Luck? Hah! Look around these forums my friend and you will see many MANY people are having problems with 2.9.8. I've been using LW for over a year with excellent results, I was certainly maintaining far better than your reported 5% connection success before this version. If you asked me to guess, I would say more like 25%. I almost never had a download attempt fail once commmenced, and the connections would remain stable and available for many many hours. Many downloads later, I was astonished how well it worked. But with no major OS changes (although perhaps it may have something to do with Apple's latest Java update?), something definitely broke in 2.9.8. The problem is definitely associated with connection reliability and duration - hosts rarely seem to hang around for longer than maybe 20 seconds now.