What I would suggest is a "Pause" button, that suspends all downloads and uploads, without diconnecting from the Gnutella network if running as an UltraPeer (because the Gnutella connections don't take much bandwidth).
Disconnecting from Gnutella does not suspend uploads and downloads.
It would be most useful when one has a long list of files to download. For now, all what can be done is to Stop the download, and then manually relaunching them from the Library's Incomplete folder.
May be the "Incomplete" library folder should be hidden from the library tree, and displayed only in the download pane, with an icon column indicating whever it is in pause, actively connecting/downloading, queued, or finished. This column should sort by task order: first the active downloads, then the queued items (ordered by the delay before they should be attempted), then the paused items, then the finished items.
The downloads in that list should also indicate the red color (like in the results pane) for active, queued, paused or failed elements whose source is pushed. (When a download terminates from a failed push, "need more source" will not be displayed, as there's no way to connect to them to get alternate locations; the other sources are retryable by connecting to them directly to get newer alternate sources).
This per-file pause feature would also allow prioritizing some downloads that are the most advanced; for now they are all mixed within the queued status.
The global pause would be useful when LimeWire is started (notably at boot time): LimeWire could reconnect immediately to the Gnutella network and would use minimum bandwidth, but all downloads and uploads would be suspended. This global pause would not alter the individual pauses set on some file in the download queue. When LimeWire transfers are globally paused, Limewire would reply to incoming uploads with a "retry later, busy" response, but it would still participate to the download mesh to collect and advertize alternate locations. |