Unreliable Connection Problem, DETAILED mod please help

[vincejr420]

Problem:
Cannot maintain connection to hosts for longer than 10 minutes or sometimes even 10 seconds.....

Details:
We have 2 machines, one win2k, one mac w/OS X. We have a dedicated T1 line with router. The router is properly configured with triggers to open ports as needed when limewire needs them. The win2k box has limewire 2.8.6 with java 1.4 and the Mac has 2.8.5 with OS X's jave engine.

THIS PROBLEM IS ONLY OCCURING ON THE WIN2K BOX, the mac does not experience this problem. Limewire on our mac is wonderful. So we know our connection/pipe is OK along with our router settings.

The problem is that once limewire boots we watch the connection window pane to see the list of servers scroll by. The list fills with attempted connetions, we have our limewire set at maintain 8 connections. BUT, barely any of the attempted connetions "stick" or are solid. Most usually disconnect in under 1 minute, some last 5 minutes. But the end result is the same, we cannot get reliable searches because search results become invalid after these connections are lost...... The average number of "messages I/O" that we see before disconnection is about 20-50....we never seem to get a solid, reliable connection to other machines.

This problem occurs no matter if we run the mac and win2k client machines simultaneously or one at a time.... In fact, the mac will maintain a list of 8 connected host for 4 or 5 days all the while the win2k box is still scanning through the server list, we watch this in the connections pane of the limewire app.

We let the win2k box run for serveral days.....no matter what we set in the maintain connections box, the limewire app always falls back to 3 connections after a few minutes (this has to be a bug). Furthermore, sometimes we get lucky and the win2k box maintains 3 connections for a hour or two...but as soon as the limewire app begins scanning through the server list, trying to connect to other machines, all the sudden our good connections are LOST or disconnected.....this happens ALL THE TIME, we may get lucky and have 6 good connections then limewire starts working on the rest and somehow our good connections are broken.....(possible bug # 2).

Once again, the machines are on the same identical network, side by side, win2k cannot maintain connections nor the settings for "try to maintain connections" where as the mac os x machine has NO problems.

We have uninstalled and reinstalled limewire 3 times on the win2k box with so resolution....

Please help!!! email vincejr@ufl.edu if you can help.....