I discovered why the bitrate column and extra search fields were all missing.

LimeWire wants write permission in its application directory. It'll happily run without this level of access, but not everything will work as expected. For example, the bitrate column will be missing.

Apparently, LimeWire creates a few files in its application directory on first run. If it is unable to create these files, some features will be unavailable.

To duplicate this problem, trash the LimeWire application directory and then perform an installation. Before running it, adjust the permissions. For example:

sudo chown -Rh root:admin /Applications/LimeWire
sudo chmod -R a+rX /Applications/LimeWire
sudo chmod -R go-w /Applications/LimeWire

Now start LimeWire, and notice that the bitrate column is missing. If you click on "Audio" to search for audio, the additional fields will also be missing.

This is a problem on Mac OS X and probably other Unix variants, because there is no guarantee that the user running an application has write permission on it. In fact, it is good practice to prevent unauthorized users from creating and modifying applications and support files shared by all users of the system. LimeWire should be restructured so that memory can be used in these cases instead of the disk, or if things must be stored on disk, they should be stored in ~/Library/Preferences/LimeWire, along with limewire.props.

Some of the files LimeWire creates on first run include Display.props and lib/xml. More can be found with intelligent use of "find -newer".

Mark

LimeWire 2.7.5
Mac OS X 10.2.2