I upgraded to Limewire 2.9.8 Pro, and am finding it difficult to maintain connections to hosts. The older version would allow me to specify manually the number of hosts and it would maintain that number, now I assume the number is three, but everytime I watch the connections they keep switching, dropping, re-connecting etc. They don't maintain their connection very long.

When you are running as a leaf, 3 connefctions is what it should be, more won't drastically improve your search results, but will waste bandwidth.

On the other hand, for this to work, you should have stable connections. If you have a router, try setting it to forward port 6346 to the local IP address of the machine you're running limewire on.

generally, it may take a while for limewire to find good hosts to connect to. it seems that it quickly drops connections to non-limewire hosts.