whatever the problem was, it seems to have resolved itself for the moment. Suddenly, I've gone from having up to 3 connections to having 24 connections and over 3 million mb available to search again(see tools/statistics). At least twice earlier today, I got a repeated error message that limewire couldnt' connect to hosts w/ likely reason of either content blocking of port or wirewall...neither of which should have been the case because before I had no firewall in place, and now I've set it up w/ the appropriote ports, and my ISP does not limit the service.

As to the jmrm and jeannemrm....my mistake...I use jeannemrm on most things and put it in by habit...the forum didn't give me an error, so I assumed it was right until I tried to log back in to edit a message and couldn't and sent for my password etc.

The message about available files/mb usually comes up after the enabling open information sharing has run and a good connection has been established...it comes up at the top of the limewire browser, as a page title comes up at the top of a browser window.

As to the other item I'd changed which made the value false, In one of the forum responses, they talked about changing to some other commonly used listening port if your ISP blocked gnutellas normal port..As I didn't know if my ISP had begun this, I tried it...either I hadn't changed it back or had but then had a crash such that changes were not saved.

I still suspect some kind of network issue...it could be local here in Europe or even scandinavia that was somehow preventing a good connection, especially since it came on suddenly a few days ago and LW has been working fine for me for a long time. There have also been intermittant web and mail connection issues in the last week, but not as noticeable as the LW problem.

Thanks for the help and I'll let all know if it happens again.