'I have had this crashing problem with every version tried previously. '

Sounds as though it's not necessarily a LW issue but moreso, an issue with your setup. I'm neither a firewall/netwk person so I probably shouldn't be anwerring this, but it sounds as though it's something else! My only attempts at using LW over a netwk 2-3 of yrs ago were a failure for a few reasons. One of them being firewall & another being an extremely busy server (access speeds at times were particularly slow), but neither of these things seems to apply to you. If you're really determined to upld/dwnld, try other alternatives such as (if at all possible) locally.
There are people on the forum who know about these issues, hopefully at least one will come to the attention of this one!