um, definitely not normal. Seems like the issue was that somehow Limewire connected to a small isolated island in the gnutella network. This is extremely rare (in fact the first time I've seen it happen).

something you could try to see if that was the case is to delete the $HOME/.limewire directory (after backing it up first of course) - that will make Limewire try a fresh start and connect to a different entry point in the network. The normal time for limewire to connect should be less than 10 seconds and you should be able to start searches after that with lots of results.

Once you get everything running smoothly unset LD_ASSUME_KERNEL because it disables NPTL which makes Limewire consume significantly more cpu time.

Regarding Blackdown vs Sun - well its up to you (Blackdown isn't that much more free) but keep in mind that we do all development on the Sun jre and will most likely not address bugs that happen on different jres. (of course it is always fun to try - esp. exotic ones like Bea and IBM - but we give absolutely no guarantee it will work ;-))