I didn't have any firewalls up and I had tried all the tips I found in the forums and still couldn't get limewire or winmx to connect. Then the other day I had to contact my isp to try and fix a problem that started in earlier that day that was making my connection drop 1 to 2 minutes after I got online. The point is they had me type this in at the 'Start > Run' prompt, 'netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt'. After doing this and restarting my computer my connection ran smoothly again, and all the sudden limewire and winmx worked like a charm. Hope this helps somebody, by the way I'm on windows xp home (sp2 if that makes a difference). Cheers.