you guys are doing a great job helping out us Mac folks. All I can add is that your numbers sound right to me Peerless (and thanks for taking the time), that the earlier reported problems with external firewire drives and early versions of Panther shouldn't apply here, and that the only time LW might rehash all the files is if the fileurns.cache gets corrupted somehow.

The hash is written (and backed up) in two files stored in the ~Library->Preferences->LimeWire folder

fileurns.bak
fileurns.cache

those files are about 200KB each storing hashes for 1128 files here (~4 GB). Perhaps that will give another benchmark.

I have shared >11,000 files with no obvious problems in the past, but nowhere near 40 GB.

edit--Took just about 7 mins to hash the kid's Music folder (174 files; 1.27 GB) minutes; the fileurns.cache started at 4KB and ended up at 44 KB (800MHz iMac OS 10.3.2 running the LW 3.9.2jum288), but on the startup disk.

Hmmm that fits the 6-7 hrs hash time for the file number, but only 3-4 hours based on total size.