i'm running bearshare betas (currently 4.5.0b44).

when limewire is downloading from bearshare, it sometimes thinks the file i have is larger than it really is. this causes limewire to ask for a final chunk which is too large. bearshare truncates the request to the actual number of bytes left in the file, and sends those bytes. limewire then requests the same (too large) chunk from bearshare, and round and round it goes until i cancel the upload manually.

1) limewire should pay attention to the file size on the source. in case of doing a multi-source download, make sure all sources agree as to the file size as well as the hash.

apparently, there is a bug in some versions of bearshare (not the version i'm running) in which a user can, for example, add and ID3 tag to an MP3 file, which changes it's size, but bearshare fails to make a new hash for the modified file. this causes the hash on the bad bear and my bear to be the same, but the bad bear's file size is larger than mine, triggering the limewire problem.

there's also (i hear) a bug in shareaza partial file sharing messages where the list of partial ranges from shareaza is wrong, leading to the same problem as above.

2) limewire should notice that it's attempting to download the same range more than once in a row and failing, and bail out after some number of attempts to prevent locking up the far end's upload slot.

analysis of the problem can be found in the bearshare forums at this address:
http://www.bearshare.com/forum/showthread.php?t=28238