Well I think I've tried everything now and still no improvement. Tried the latest jum build 4.10.2. Thanks to everbody who made suggestions but I'm about ready to give up on Limewire for a while and see if it's fixed in the next release. The only good thing is that any active downloads seem to complete at normal speed even though everything else is so slow that it is unusable. So I've got about 10 minutes after opening LW to enter some download requests then I have to leave it running for about half an hour. When I come back LW will have quit but I might have a few files downloaded. Not ideal.

Deano

There's a memory leak in LW 4.10 for Mac OSX. As soon as you do a search, the VM memory increases & doesn't stop. My suggestion would be that in the meantime you aim for one of Jum's builds that does not include the Spam filter. Look at his nightly builds as he normally includes a no. of versions. Choose one of the earlier ones.

My LW 4.10 runs for 1 hr if I do a search & then crashes. However, as OAH said, he tried the version without the spam filter & it seems to work ok for him. The alternative is to step back a version until LW releases a bug fix.

LOTR, I'd be very happy to go back to an earlier version. The version I was running before was fine but I'm not sure which one it was. Do you know where I can download earlier versions?

Deano

See my pm. I'll send you a couple of 4.9 versions.

Big thanks to LOTR. I went back to LW4.8.1 and it runs fine. Getting internal error messages ocasionally when it has been open for a long time, but I remember getting those before. Ran it for two hours and everything is responding normally.
However I'm really confused now because the activity monitor is still showing all the physical memory used up and an ever-increasing VM allocation. So maybe the acitvity monitor is lying and it was just a red herring. When I get time I will work forwards through the versions and see at what point it goes wrong.

I just tried to really test it by opening a photoshop document. It was a bit slow but it opened ok and seemed to steal the memory back from LW. When I closed PS the free memory went back up to 200M and LW started to slowly use it all up again.

You'll "need to" delete the LW preferences folder whilst LW is closed!!! You'll find it here: /Users/your_username/Library/Preferences/LimeWire
After that LW's behaviour should return to normal. It seems that with the 4.10 adjusted preferences, the earlier version LW's behave in a similar fashion in many ways including it's natural self-searching technique after you open LW (as in when it's trying to self-connect to each incomplete one by one.)

Well I deleted the LW preferences but the activity monitor is still showing all the memory used up. So it looks like that is not the problem with LW4.10. Although there is only 5M or so free memory, most of the used memory is inactive and seems to be given up to other processes when necessary. The Virtual Memory allocation is over 3G and keeps increasing. I wonder what will happen if it runs out of disc space. Anyway thanks to LOTR I have a working version of LW again so I’m happy. I’ll try the later versions and post results, but 4.8.1 is definitely ok. Hopefully the LW developers will get on to it and provide a fix for 4.10 but in the meantime if you have the same problem I think going back to an earlier version is the only solution.

Deano

Update for anyone interested. LW4.8.1 is fine, 4.9.28 is not. The spam filter was not introduced until after 4.9.28 so it can’t be that. Maybe the problem was always there in 4.9. I don’t have an earlier version of 4.9 so I can’t pinpoint it any closer.

Deano

I am having the same exact problem and I have tried all of the fixes listed in the various threads. I am running the limewire basic 4.10 and it eventually slowes down to a crawl. I never had any problems with the previous version of limewire and likewise wish I had never clicked the download for the new version.

didn't mean to hijack another post but no one is replying to mine. Does anyone have an earlier copy of limewire basic I had no problems with my old one but I don't remember which version it was. By eventually slows to a crawl I meant that it runs slow all the time but after about 15 min I can't do any other applications on my computer and have to force quit limewire because it stops responding and then I need to restart computer to get things rolling again.