The end result of my original problem is that the number of hosts eventually came back up. I paused/resumed them a few times, restarted Limewire a few times...which may not have mattered. I guess it just took a while for it to find and establish good connections with many more hosts.

Although, it did seem to pick up a lot once I set my upload speed to maximum, and put a bunch more items in my shared folder.

I guess like with all p2p...patience is usually the remedy.

p.s. I used to limit my upload spead to about 12k. Thinking it would leave more bandwidth for my downloads. I don't think it really changed anything. I was just playing around, trying to get those 2-3 week downloads to go a little faster.