hi zab,

thanks for the suggestions.

i've just re-installed java, then re-installed limewire. still no good..

i'll have to look further into the possible X problems - this is one area where the two machines differ substantially - the old machine runs nVidia gfx, whereas the newer one has an ATI Radeon fitted, and I've had a bit of grief already with the fglrx driver....

there was one other peculiarity - instead of running the supplied LW scripts, I tried 'java -jar LimeWire.jar' - still very slow. Then I appended -Xdebug on the end (trying to see if I could generate some debug messages - I know *nothing* about Java!!), and the program launched very quickly, but wouldn't connect.... arrrrghh....

thanks all for any help on this - when LW is up and running, it's great!