If there's any remainind doubt that these problems are occurring with nonexcessive or abnormal usage and a fairly beefy machine, the following just happened:

Started it up again -- predictably, it refused to resume old downloads. Sharing 10,681 files. Hash index recently rebuilt. I did a single search; after five minutes I switched back to Limewire and found 192 results (some duplicates, and most files I already have). Selected them all and hit download, then sorted through the overwrite dialogs hitting "no" to each. (This, rather than just sort by "quality" and select just the ones with stars, because I've found the paper-with-check often fails to appear for files I have and sometimes appears for files I don't. Until it works I'm stuck with this method for making groups of files complete.) About 3/4 of the way through the list, Limewire hung, and task manager showed greatly decreased network activity and over 100 threads. About five minutes later, the thread count dropped to around 50 and the UI became responsive again. At this point commit charge 798M/1622M, actually on the high side for usual; note that 1GB of the 1622 is *physical* ram so the system's about two more Limewire instances away from swapping, let alone running out of memory, based on its current process size of 103,664K (that's VM process size listed in Task Manager -- both virtual machine and virtual memory, so, the true size of the process excluding DLLs concurrently in use by other processes). Nonetheless, there's an out of memory error dialog displayed prominently in the Limewire UI, mocking me and my gigabyte of RAM. I dismiss it, and note that my connection quality is merely good -- one red bar. Within seconds, though, it becomes two and then three! Limewire has apparently taken it upon itself to close some connections without any input from me on the matter -- and it must be happening locally, since independent failures at three remote hosts (or routing three remote hosts) are very unlikely indeed. Astronomically so. Either my network connection is malfunctioning or Limewire is, and the network connection checks out fine since browsing to this "submit a post" page in Firefox gives no trouble or so much as a hint of delay. If www.gnutellaforums.com is reachable it's unlikely three specific independent hosts in geographically random locations (thanks to turning off locale preferencing!) all became unreachable within seconds of one another. Oh no, Limewire is surely to blame here, taking the initiative to trim bandwidth usage I suppose, while the task manager's network monitor shows a full 2/3 of my bandwidth available. (This is with normal activity; it recovered about when the bogus out of memory error appeared.) Shortly the connection quality recovers. In the download list: seven files. Miraculously, one of them actually ****ing downloads successfully in seconds, as I watch in astonishment.

Seven files, and up for about ten minutes, one search done which returned a typical number of results -- that's all it takes to get unacceptable crashes/misbehavior from Limewire on a 1.5GHz 1GB Athlon machine. The developers must test this on 4GB quad Xeon boxes or something if their test suites don't reveal problems like this prerelease. Nothing, however, excuses them from releasing into the stable branch code that must have had everyone betatesting 3.9.x pulling out their hair at the error messages, the frequent hangs and data loss... What were they THINKING?!