Hi

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of P2P. You have joined the party at a difficult time. Unfortunately, too many people have been signing up for the system to handle as originally conceived. We are therefore going through "growing pains" while decisions are made as to how to absorb the additional membership equitably.

That said, the fact that your machines are indicating the number of files available indicates that you are running in ultrapeer mode (this was made the default setting in LW Preferences). This converts your machine into a messaging node for potentially quite large volumes of data traffic across the whole network. I tried leaving LW on in the background while I ran other applications and I ground to a halt and suffered system crashes. So, as a first step, deselect ultrapeer as an option in your Preferences file. Life is better as a leaf mode right now.

However, do not expect that this will suddenly produce cascades of successful downloads. Things may improve when 3.0 is released but you will find that downloading needs time and effort.

(Off topic — are you connected to the publishing Eidolon or are you an HPL fan?)