I don't know, I did a search and I think this is a different question, but I do beg pardon in advance if I didn't go back far enough reading searches and I'm beating you all with a dead horse here.

I'm using LW Pro, the latest version and have deleted preferences, but that's not really related to my question, I don't think.

When I very first bought LW Pro, I did it because I liked the concept of being able to d/l from many people to get a whatever it was faster. So if 10 people had what I wanted, I could d/l from that pool of 10, rather than just grabbing it from one of ten. Become a Borg, as it were.

Has that ended? I'm currently d/l some stuff where there are 20+ users with each item, and each item is showing 50+ minutes to d/l. With previous versions last year, say, I'd have had these puppies downloaded in a minute or so and it would say "dowloading from "x" number of sources."

Now, I got nuthin'. But apparently a lot of time on my hands. Did something change? I'm still showing a turbo connection, I'm still a leaf, I've got nice connections and I'm not showing an unreasonable drop rate.

Is it just Nutella now?

Do other p2p apps download at reasonable speed? Who is your ISP?
Are all downloads really slow?
Try downloading a file with a few sources, rather than the file with the most sources. Any difference?

Even with Pro, you'll only be able to download from a maximum of 10 hosts (unless the file's a torrent - in that case you can download from more hosts).

Deleting the preferences folder can help with all kinds of problems, so it's always good to try that After you deleted the prefs folder, did you have to go through LW's setup wizard all over again? If you've used really old versions of LW in the past, there could be a folder in the old location of C:\Documents and Settings\your username\.limewire... did you also check for an old folder?

Have you seen the tips here (first few posts by murasame)? A few things to consider while configuring Limewire for optimal performance...

Sometimes a new search can kickstart a slow/stuck file. Don't cancel the original download - just search again for the file. That's helped with quite a few of my bogged files in LW 5.

And if you really hate LW 5, your Pro personal download page has a link to 4.18.8 on the left hand side - 'Get LimeWire Pro Classic'.

Basic 4.18.8 can be downloaded from here: Lime Wire » Download Out-Of-Date Installers

Thanks, Birdy.

I've deleted my Prefs file several times and scoured for oldies (I think I caught 'em all and I've deleted my gnutella file a couple of times for good effort too). And this is with all d/ls, not just a few, and it's been since the last few upgrades, although to be fair, I'm one of the people who was getting zero search results for a couple of months and then suddenly started getting some when I was playing around with Java of all things. So I can't really count what I was getting from the last couple of updates.

It seems worse when I'm downloading music and it doesn't seem to matter how many hosts there are. I suppose the number of hosts could be exaggerated because of spammers and the single host responses could be DSLers with low bandwidth dedications.

4.18.8 is my personal enemy, lol. I'm never going there again.

Of course I missed the thread you linked to...I just knew I'd miss something obvious to try, argh.

Thank you!!

(Oops, my ISP is Charter - they seem to be okay when my son is playing Warcraft, the little geek, so I don't think they're restricting my bandwidth even though they ARE one of the evil empire)

My experience with Charter Communications suggests a new logo for them; two tin cans and a string!

Some ISPs limit the amount of bandwidth available for up/downloads; some impose limits according to the time of day. I'm pretty sure Charter is among them; it's worth inquiring. (The limits would not affect Warcraft).

I had no trouble with LW 4.18 Pro, but a few months ago I switched to downloading torrents via Vuze.