I am pleased and relieved that you have some of your Hero's blood in your veins. I suspect the problems are going to get worse before they get better so you'd better batten down the hatches to keep that lunch of your's dry while you eat it.

But seriously, you can improve performance even in these difficult times if you take a positive approach to the problems. Experiment on your own and read round these threads (nuggets of useful advice buried in these here hills).

And the weather here is to die for which, given the current paranoia over the SARS outbreak, is not to be taken too literally.

I am glad to hear that other people are having this issue. I just got a download to work and I've had way less than the purported 5% rate. Limewire used to be the best mac sharing program around. Now it just sux.

You did not understand my earlier post on this topic. This is not a LimeWire problem. This is a Gnutella problem. Think of it this way: a small group of people get together and they all interconnect and have fun. Then thousands of other people hear there's this good thing going and they all come along to join. That would not be so bad except that the majority now using the network are takers and not true sharers. So, to keep all these interconnections going, a substantial amount of the bandwidth is taken up in connection traffic. Then, some of the Gnutella applications themselves are antisocial and generate multiple searches which overloads much of what is left of the bandwidth. To add to the problem of overcrowding, many of the users are not interested in sharing so they maximise the download speed and minimise the upload speed in their preferences (the speed of data exchange between two hosts is always at the slower speed). And they only stay on-line for short periods of time and then log off while half the world is downloading from them. I could go on with the bad news but there is little point. The Limewire developers are trying to make changes which will appear in 3.0 that will reduce the traffic and restore some of the efficiency that used to prevail. But this can only be a firefighting exercise given that Gnutella itself is grinding to a halt. I suspect that the days of happy downloading you used to enjoy are gone for ever. And, just to confirm my own performance levels, I find that only about 5% of hosts allow connections and, of that 5%, I probably get half downloaded on a good day. In a bad session, I get no complete downloads. But, since I've only been using Limewire for two months, I've known no better. As of today, I've downloaded 1474 complete files. How are you doing?