Well after letting LimeWire download files overnight i had the misfortune of my win98 freezing up on me and I ctrlaltdeleted it .
When i turned LimeWire back on there was nothing in the download section to resume , all of them gone.

Hell what's that all about?

I go to see if the files are in the Incomplete and they are , so i reopen the program and nothing happens.

Solution to the problem :

Well i came to the forums here and realized that everyone is having this annoying problem.

Here is the solution:

When it happens

1.Reset Computer
2.Copy all the files from Incomplete into a safe place and delete the originals.
//make copy of downloads.dat , note size//
Infact this is the most important file of all, i make backup of it every hour or so
3.Open LimeWire
4.Close LimeWIre
5.Copy the old files back to Incomplete
6.Open LimeWire

This should do the trick and all of your stuff is trying to resume.

Now i have done this and it works, though i haven't done much extensive testing but in 1hr this is what worked.

I tested different variations of the resume also in case someone has a question about them.

1. Single file / Single Host
2. Single file / Multiple Hosts
3. Multiple files / Multiple Hosts

All of those seem to get fixed in the same way.


Other things i noticed :

When you uninstall the version of LimeWire and reinstall it , the fix does work.

But if you install a different version it doesn't

Again Limited testing.

Update: Well it happened again , this time i had complete backup of the files and the downloads file, and it worked again.

//It has to get fixed in the code , it's getting more than annoying//

-Have Fun and Share good complete files , remove the Incomplete directory from the share list.

-[MILF]-Trib

could you be a little more descriptive about the resume dl soulution. it didn't work for me.

I'm getting more than frustrated with LW's inability to resume...

Can't they fix this bug?? The fix mentioned above doesn't seem to work.

Hmm - the "solution" sounds interesting - I´ll try.

The problem with losing files might not be with LimeWire - I have experienced that with several other programs. The only program I know where I hadn´t that problem is GetRight.
I think it´s because Windows uses a buffered read/write method. That means that whenever a file is written/read the system does not read/write a file but the corresponding buffer in memory, reducing access time. BUT when the computer crashes, there is no data written to the harddisk.

That MIGHT be the case.

Interestingly, I used builds a few revs ago and when I had the problem with resume, I could go back and see that a previous file that I was downloading had a different "designation." I'd then copying the previous file to a safe area, rename the current download to match with the "good" download and the resume function would work. It's confusing and painstaking, but it worked. Now the strange thing is that it doesn't seem to work anymore in Limewire version 2.x-and-up.

When a new download is begun it doesn't show up at all in the incomplete area, which it used to before. Yet, a previously incomplete download is still being downloaded, overrighting your previously incomplete download!

This is terrible and as I can see by the previous threads, is affecting everyone.

I'm going to try your "workaround," and see if this works.

This seemed like a good idea, but my downloads.dat file is already hosed.

What would be nice is an option to recreate the file from the contents of the folder. This could happen when you hit "refresh" while in the Incompletes section of the Library.

Developers? Are you listening? It's not a fix for the problem, but a workaround is better than nothing...

Taliban's post about how the only time limewire will delete files is when
the 'Automatically delete incomplete files after X days' setting is set too
low made me think there might be a problem here.. i had recently updated
to 2.3.3 but had also fiddled with the settings. i was also getting the same
annoying behaviour: incomplete files list vanishing, files restarting from zero,
etc.. i just went and changed that setting back to 7 days (the default) and hit
apply, and incompletes seem to work now. i'd be interested to know if this
works for other people.. i'll do more testing too and post back if this hasn't
in fact fixed my problem.
-j

Not me. (I'm the one who posted just before yours)
Mine's been set to seven days this whole time.

Try setting the value to something other than 7 days, save the setting,
quit LimeWire, then come back in and change it back to 7 days...
Taliban has mentioned in another post somewhere that LimeWire has a bug
causing it to reset that value zero...
I switched mine to 28 days, then back to 7 days, and incompletes are working again.
-josh