I've had some strange luck with LimeWire. We're running ver. 2.3.2 with very little success. My daughter has a computer in her room that will not connect to the gnutella network. I've taken the necessary steps to shut down our firewall when she tries to connect, but it still doesn't work. We are using StarBand satellite internet service which is an "always on" connection. With an older computer (266MHz HP) she was able to connect at will and trade mp3s with people. Now, we've upgraded her to a 700MHz HP and it won't connect even though the same network settings are in place on the new machine. I'm baffled.

One strange thing though... one day, she left the program running while trying to connect. I still had the firewall running because I didn't know she was trying. She walked away from the machine for 2 hours and when she returned, it had connected and she was able to download over 100MB of data! What's even stranger is that since that day, it hasn't connected again!

When we try to connect, it just runs through the list of servers saying "connecting...", but never does.

If anyone has any ideas, please pass them our way!

Thanks!
Terry (crsntps@starband.net)

You don't have to shut down your firewall. Just open port 6346 which is the one, LimeWire is running on. You might want to try if that works.

As I see it, you are connecting to the limewire hostscache (where you get the addresses of the other servers from). And if so, connecting to one or another server shouldn't be a problem. Sometimes it might take you some time to find a hosts, that is accessible for you. Try setting your connection speed to T1 and set the number of connections to keep alive to 10, maybe it works better that way.

I have only last possible solution for you: If LimeWire simply won't work, you should give BearShare a try.

Where is this setting?

In the connections tab (maybe you have to check the View/Connections button to see it). Setting it higher than 5-6 won't give you any more search results, though.

No matter how many i set it to I can only get 3 connections (sometiems one of them fluctuates) no more than that no matter what computer I'm on where I am.... Any idea what's up with that?

The developers did that on purpose, to ensure simple clients don't use up too many connection slots on Ultrapeers.

So if i become an ultra peer I get more connections?

Yes, BUT it will use up about 10-15k/sec of your Bandwidth in each direction.

That's alot, my crappy cable provider limits my upstream to a pathetic 16k/sec. My downstream is like double t1 though Guess I better disable ultrapeer

Either disable Ultrapeer capabilities or disable Uploads. If you aren't sharing very much anyway, leave Ultrapeerness enabled. You can even force Ultrapeermode by setting FORCE_SUPERNODE_MODE=true in your limewire.props file.