so now ive double checked everything i mentioned- caught some differences so i had to make all the services have the same settings, and indeed i had a different java, so i switched that....i saw that incoming=true and i figured it would only be a matter of time....at the time the average uptime was only 3 mins, and now i wake up and avg is up tp 6531, all the files are finally hashed, and still no ultrapeer....when i switch over to the other os, boom! ultrapeering from the gate.

what else is l/w using as criteria?...eg. where else do i look?

i was just playing around in the stats and saw i get no pings/pongs... started thinking that might be necessary......looked in the hardware firewall and saw pings were blocked, so i undid that and now when i restart limewire its ultrapeering from the start... what i dont understand is that its settings are global regardless of which os is talking to it... and the other worked....i can only guess that there are profiles for computer names w/in it somewhere...
anyway...im glad to have this licked...