And the f*cking thing jsut hung AGAIN. I switched to it after that last post and got nothing but a blank grey window. Minimizing and unminimizing didn't change anything; maximizing and unmaximizing either. Trying to reduce it to the tray by the close box had no effect whatsoever; Limewire simply ignored me, which is ABSOLUTELY NOT CORRECT BEHAVIOR FOR AN INTERACTIVE APPLICATION -- UNDER --ANY-- CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER!!!!! I am fed up. I want these bugs fixed. I expect a genuinely STABLE "stable branch" version on the website by next Wednesday evening or ****ing else!

I don't like having to regularly kill something via task manager. I don't like it losing my download list when I do. I don't like the way it brainlessly loses the list even though while riffling through its directories earlier I saw that it DOES save a ****** backup -- which either it doesn't use, or stupidly corrupts at the same time as the main copy instead of always leaving the backup file as the last known-good version. I don't like applications that gobble up RAM and then complain that a full gigabyte is still not enough for them, and I don't like anything that regularly hangs or loses data for whatever reason. There's no excuse for showstopper-magnitude problems like this outside the odd-numbered branch, for Christ's sake; no excuse at all. Nor for posting "minimum system requirements" of a few measly megs of memory (64, was it?) and a couple hundred MHz CPU when I regularly see it max out the CPU on a 1.5GHz Athlon and complain of low memory on a machine with sixteen! times! the minimum recommended memory. And I don't need anomalously heavy usage to experience these issues either; simply starting it with a blank download list and leaving it on overnight suffices to hang the 4.0 series on my machine. Which ought logically to be able to run ten instances concurrently without more than a little slowness with bandwidth, given that I never see it exceed around 120M actual memory usage or 1/3 the total bandwidth I have.

I don't know if it's because it's written in Java, or because the developers are clueless, or because it just doesn't play nice with Windows XP. The fact of the matter is it just plain does not work acceptably on a run of the mill middle-high end system with the commonest end-user OS, up to date on service packs and drivers, with a broadband connection, and sharing a reasonably large library of files. That's not tolerable. The speed and stability of 3.3.5 must be brought back or else the features have to start being scaled back as too expensive in terms of performance. That's the bottom line.

You have till next Wednesday, close of business. If I don't see a version on the site then that actually works on my (by no means low-end) machine, then it's the end of any chance I'll ever spend a dime on pro, and the start of a very high likelihood I'll report these issues rather more widely so as to facilitate informed consumer choice.