Would you watch the connections pane to see what's going on there the next time this happens?

If you were running as an Ultrapeer, you can disable it in the preferences->speed.

Two other situations that would give me a similar loss of connections were when someone else in the house started up LimeWire or Acquisition, or when my ISP was trying to cut down on Gnutella uploads.

I use 10.2.6, so can't remember if this is worse or not with 10.1. You could also try Jens-Uwe's LW build http://baghira.han.de/~jum/LimeWire.html

Do post back to let others know what works or not.

Cheers