For the record, I have been using Limewire for just over three months. I have observed the download failure message change its wording and read the threads where this change was discussed. As I understand it, the purpose of the change was to signal that Limewire will no longer requery automatically, but the substance of the message remained unchanged, namely, that the source you have tried will not download anything or any more to you unless you do something about it. So unless I have fundamentally misunderstood the situation (which is not as uncommon as I like to think) what you complain of is not a new problem.

In 2001/2, the published research shows that only about one third of disclosed Gnutella connections were real and, of those, most failed within 27 seconds. For a variety of reasons, the situation has worsened. To achieve success (and, yes, I do admit to feeling quite pleased that I have prevailed in these adverse conditions) you have to be very active. I search and hit all the disclosed hosts for the track I want. Those that come up "awaiting sources" I restart the download because the initial rejection may have been due to a queueing problem at a busy host. If that fails, I immediately move on to the next host. My record for simultaneous downloads of a single track is eight. During any one session, I will make hundreds of download requests for different tracks, hundreds of kill download and restart download key strokes, repeating the searches to refresh stalled downloads on a routine basis (the autocomplete facility is very useful for this but always amend to match the typography of a host that has started to download to you), host browsing to add an additional string to the download request strategy, etc, etc. In other words, it is like playing a computer game with non-stop activity, always ready to kill and restart the current downloads from the original points in the carefully managed search boxes the moment any one connection is lost. To maximise success in adverse conditions requires effort.

I commend you for paying for Limewire. All shareware projects of quality should be supported one way or another. As to the entrenched interests of larger corporations and their understandable desire to protect their profits, extending the conversation would take us too far off-topic.