Well, all I can say is that my experience does not match yours, which may or may not be significant but, without information on which machines you are using, what OS you have, what internet connection you have and which version of Limewire you are using, it is difficult to offer anything other than broad-stroke advice. If you want to go back, LW 2.7 is no longer available. The developers are trying to move everyone on to the more recent versions. I remember having reasonable success with this version: http://www3.limewire.com/download/2.8.6/

I hope you have better luck with that. However, that you are not managing to get "any" results from Limewire does suggest more general machine or internet connection problems. As a matter of interest, are you private users at home (and, if so, have you enabled port 6346?) or are you on a LAN (in which case, what is your system administrator's formal QoS policy for p2p application users?).