Hi Everyone! Like a lot of users, I'm fairly a novice and LW was such a joy. In the last couple of days my connections went to nothing. Once I did get a "firewall" message, so I disabled the firewall. I tried all the recommendations: tweek the number of slot for up/down loads, tweek the bandwidth, force and change port addresses, ran the "test page" and it was successfull. I'm running XP SP2 to a cable modem (ISP Optimum), LW is 4.10.5 and Java is 1.5.0_06. Based on posted information, I called the ISP and he had me run a test which showed a 555 Kbps rate and he test packet delivery which came up at 100%. Now I sit here with 5 uploads sharing 1KBps and averaging 5 days to upload. My downloads indicate 12 in "connecting" status and about 120 in "queued" status. Any hints or spikes I came push down the line???

Addendum to the original post.

Pulled up the LW "connections" tab:
Host=,,,dyn.optonline.net
Status:outgoing
Messages(I/O):200/48
Bandwigth(I/O):0.006/0.000KB/s
Dropped(I/O):78%/0%
Protocol:Ultrapeer
Vendor/Version:LimeWire/4.8.1

I'm running LW 4.10.5 with XP SP2, firewall disabled and all I get is "connecting" up to my set limit of 12 and the rest are "Queued, Awaiting, Waiting or Need". Briefly I saw a flash that LW said in Status column during download - "looking for stable" or words to that effect. I want my LW back!! Tried all the other posted solutions - NADA!!!!!!

You mean you tried changing the ports as suggested here http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...threadid=52953

You'd need to change port for LW as well as firewall.

I turned the Windows firewall "off". Then I followed the instructions about "note the listening port" and use a different number (52000) both in LW tools/options/firewall/listening port and in Control Panel/Network Connections/Local 2/Advanced Settings/TCP and UDP at 127.0.0.1 and internal/external 52000.

I got two files to download, each took 2 hours (4.8K each) separated by two hours and that's all of todays work. Helps?

Addendum: I've done some more gyrating and nothing works. I'm down to two choices since everybody thinks it's somebady elses fault/error/problem. My choices are; 1) dump LW for another P2P provider and/or 2) go to DSL from Optimum. Right now, I'm favoring the second choice. I'll let you know how things turn out. Good Luck with your issues.

You might consider trying a proxy: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...144#post124144
The thing about proxies though is you may need to try many numbers before you find one that works, & works at reasonable speed. Here's a recent one that worked for one person http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...&highlight=tor