>I left LimeWire on all night trying to upload some largish .avi files (56M) while others were trying to upload similar files. Both uploads and downloads skipped in and out continuously. Neither downloads or uploads got anywhere near completion even though the estimated completion time was only 2 hours.

januss -- try unchecking 'clear completed uploads', you'll see that the problem really is a display issue.

what is happening is that the most recent versions of limewire opted to try and let these chunked uploads display a smoother progress indicator. so, instead of using the requested size (which an intermediary version had done) to see the % completed, it uses the whole file size, and then appends the amount that was previously uploaded ..

since there is really no way for these chunked downloads/uploads (officially called HTTP/1.1 transfers) to say "I am eventually going to recieve this much in total", the time remaining becomes a complete estimate, and it was opted to assume that people will try to recieve the entire file.

this can have two different effects, depending on if you've got 'clear completed uploads' checked or not. if it is checked, after every chunk finishes, it will be wiped from the screen and the new chunk will be put in its place, but the progress will only go a meager amount, and the time remaining will appear completely off. if it isn't checked, the progress will smoothly flow to near-complete and the time remaning will appear closer. this will continue until the person is finished retrieving the file, at which point the status will stop at complete, but the progress may not necesarily be 100%, since they don't need the full file to be complete.

if you check the uploads column in the library tab, you'll see that these chunked transfers have a huge amount of completed / attempted uploads, because each little chunk is counted as a distinct upload. whether or not it should do this is another story - but it is an indicator that things are working the way they were meant to.

i agree that there could be some improvements to the display (and i've thought of a few ways to do it), but the core behavior -- namely the actual transfering of the files -- is working exactly as intended.

Well, it may be working as intended, but as a matter of interface design, it is horrible, in my opinion.
I connect to others fine, and download fine, but the upload and monitor windows need some serious work to reflect what is going on. It worked great in earlier editions, so it is not a matter of reinventing the wheel, just go back to what worked before. Even the progressive upload idea where a 10,000 kb file looked like 100 uploads at 100kb each made sense. You could tell what was happening. Now I have no clue, it looks as though no progress is being made from looking at the bar graph, just connecting, uploading, disappearing, connecting, uploading, disappearing, connecting, uploading, disappearing.
I'd like to believe that the programmers did not think this was a desirable effect.

it's really an unintended consequence of adding functionality to the core downloading/uploading engine. i doubt there was any intention of making it this way. it does end up looking kinda odd -- the best suggestion, for now, is to uncheck the 'clear completed uploads' box. things look much more normal that way.

it'll be fixed soon enough -- but its the holidays now, so people are generally on vacation.

Thanks, I didn't have it turned on. I used to, but in the morning, I would have a scrolling list about 10 miles long, so I disabled that.

Well, we will have something to look forward to in the New Year, when they fix the bugaboos.

Another question, since you are well versed. Even the LimeWire web site acts oddly. Is that Java also? I try to use the navigation bars, and they do not handle smoothly. On OS 10, it's hard to get the right box to turn green.

not sure about the site -- i run on a pc with windows 2000, using internet explorer 6. it seems to work just fine for me.

I tried the limewire site using Mozilla for OS 10, and it works much better. Apparently, MS Internet Explorer and LimeWire aren't real friendly. Might be something to do with the Sun MicroSystem and Microsoft battle?