I have 4,600 songs that I share online, and now Limewire takes FOREVER to make these available (loading on average one song per second), instead of the 10-15 seconds it did take to load the entire library to share....

and it does this each time I load Limewire...

how makes this program anyway..why on each upgrade they fix some feature and break others?

I too have experienced problems with Limewire when sharing large amount of files (16g). I now only share about 100 at a time. When sharing large amount of files I could not get many downloads successfully.

Hint. Modify limeware JAVA properties file to increase number of possible connections. GUI edit prevent you from exceeding 6.
However, by directly editing the propertie file with notepad you can avoid these edits. This is the attribute KEEP_ALIVE=19. It shows up in the Connections tab as "keep approximately # connections alive"; where # = 19 (for example as in my override).

This problem has only come up with the latest update to Limewire for Mac. In this one you can now browse other users collections. Perhaps this is what is causing the incredible slow down.

I have not had this problem. I am sharing 775 files and the very first time I loaded 2.5.5 it took a long time to scan them but on subsequent loading it was very fast.