ok i have tried the port forwarding bit.... it doesnt seem to change anything, i have just read up when looking online about port forwading for the 3com router that it is "Very very frustrating if your using P2P program such as Limewire, shareaza, etc 3com firewall is just too sensitive" this is porobably why i am having all these problems?

i tried it and I don’t think it agreed wit my system limewire couldn’t get any connection at all, and, for some strange reason decided it was going "old school" on me, you know the old look limewire used to have?, but ah well after I uninstalled it and reinstalled it twice and then took off all the ports n' stuff the firewall has strangely disappeared and the downloads started working a tad faster (averaging about 9-15Kb/s now which I am happy with) but its still got the older version look about it. I have looked in the about section and it says its 4.10.9 which is the latest version

the latest stable release is 4.10.9, which you should get from www.limewire.com only

that is where i got it from thats the thing that is seriously confusing me it is a proper copy from limewire.com so there really isnt any excuse, it loads up with the newest limewire logo and then loads into the old version, even though it says its version 4.10.9

if it says 4.10.9, try changing skins.

yup checked that also i unistalled limewire, and deleted any files names with limewire in it and then reinstalled the latest 4.10.9 version which installs fine, but when it has loaded its the old style. i tried changing the skins to see it it was just that but th skins are all the old looking type.

If you deleted your LW preferences folder then that will have also deleted your skins afaik. You can downld more from here http://www.limewire.com/english/content/skins.shtml

btw The LW 4.11.1 beta displayed the 4.10 logo. The 4.11.2 beta shows a 4.11 logo

Argh well i dont really care that much, limewire has stopped being skyitso on me now and the globe has no wall, downloads go at bout 30kb/s when everyone on my LAN is offline whcih i think is an achivement being 10x faster than it used to be. Thankyou all so much for helping me and hopefully i wont have to moan on the forum again

Thanks again