Try doing the following: Start Limewire, start a couple of random downloads and close it again. If the downloads.dat in your shared directory has a size of 375 bytes (or a similar value, since it might differ from version to version) it is empty, which means LimeWire was unable to write it. (Check file permissions in that case).

If it was written, but still it is not read after restart, I don't know what happened. I don't know that kind of behaviour from the official LimeWire-version. The latest CVS-code seems to incorporate that bug, but that hasn't been released yet.

Are you using AquaLime or CleanLimeWire?

- The file is exactly 375 bytes, after starting a download and stopping LimeWire it grew to 2229 bytes
- File permissions are default Windows 2000 running as local administrator (this is Full Access)
- LimeWire 2.3.3 downloaded from the homepage (exactly from download.cnet.com)

It seems that version 2.2.3 had this problem and did not write the downloads.dat file because all incomplete downloads were started before upgrading to 2.3.3

It works now

That's true, LimeWire 2.2 had that bug too...

I hope these bugs will be removed in the following versions

This problem exist in 2.3.3 as well. I thought it was something I was doing. Obviously not!

And this isn't that it doesn't find the same files. They are erased from the incomplete folder.

Limewire does not delete any files from your incomplete-directory. I'm absolutely sure of that. Complete downloads will be moved to your shared directory. Other files might be overwritten by new downloads (if the saving of resume-data failed) and corrupted files will be renamed, but LimeWire absolutely never deletes incomplete files.

Well, in my case it doesn't rename anything. One time I can resume and then when it stops I can see the partially downloaded files. Then I can resume and they vanish. Whether they are erased or not I don't know, but they are indeed all gone and all that remains is the .dat file.

Have you ever looked into your LimeWire/Shared directory? They should be there, if you didn't mess around with it...

I forgot the one case, in which LimeWire does delete files:

How much time passed since you last used LimeWire? Go to options->saving and edit the number of days to keep incomplete files...