If you have a lot of incompletes & shares, it can extend connection time. Let's hope this was what was caused the extended connection time.

Another thing you can do is go to preferences, Connections I think it is & disable automatically connect. Then next time you open LW, let it settle for 10+ mins & then go to File menu -> Connect.

Tip: Purge the Downloads Queue! (click on blue link) can help here too.

Considering the sizes others have mentioned that might cause problems, I doubt it--I'm currently sharing 367 files, the maximum I've ever had being something like 420ish, and my incomplete listing has never exceeded 100 (most likely a bit less than that as I'm guesstimating). But, to be sure, I deleted everything in my Incomplete Files and Downloads queue window, so they've been clean as a whistle for several weeks now.

Something I already do after having read another thread suggesting this.

Seems I was right to be cautiously optimistic last night, as after having a turbo connection for a few hours I then lost all but one connection. Trying again tonight but getting nothing. *sigh*

One thing I've noticed, I don't know if it means anything, but potential host connections used to go to just 6 seconds, sometimes 7 seconds, in the Time column before dropping. Now I see a number of them go to twice that. Any idea why?

By the way, when I was trying the 'replace gnutella.net file' suggestion to see if it would get LimeWire to connect, I kept running into a strange problem where the file was saved as an MPEG-1 Video file. I tried several different links provided here on the forums, and each time it was the same: I clicked the link, a pop-up window informed me I'm trying open a BINARY file and asked what I want to do, I clicked the 'Save File' button and got a file named gnutella.net with a QuickTime MPEG icon on it. I ended up downloading it on a Windows machine and transferring the file to my Mac to get a usable copy of it. I've never encountered anything like this before; have you any idea why it happened?