Judging by AW's comment in the link above & discussions around that time, earlier LW versions (earlier than 4.13) would not recognise/read the list as a document in the preferences folder. However, that's not to say you could not add the lists to the LW preferences in any case. The LW preferences will have a banned host list for those hosts we manually banned, so you could arguably manually add them to that part of the preferences document. I'd need to experiment to check which document that is. For LW 4.16 that document is limewire.props, you will see a heading called BLACK_LISTED_IP_ADDRESSES perhaps 15-20% way down the document. Almost all LW preference documents can be opened using TextEdit if you drag & drop them onto the textedit icon in dock. (Of course can be saved too.)

Re: Bluetack, in that link you gave, there's considerable argument against at least one of those lists due to ip's being added & rarely if not never rechecked. These spammers frequently use dynamic ip addresses of course. And it was reported to me by one of the gnutella program devs that ip's of several innocent people including themselves were found within. He said they stopped using bluetack for their spam control.

LW 5 has its own filter list of so-called known ip spam addresses. The user does have the option to use it or not. Not sure if the list is built in or within the preferences. I queried about this ... didn't receive a clear answer.

I did like 'some' of the things LW 4.13 did & some improvements. I eventually started using LW 4.14 up until I stopped using my G4 for p2p a year ago. Changes in LW versions can be seen here http://wiki.limewire.org/index.php?title=Changelog. My G4 was a 733, oh .. you can see in my profile was similar to yours but a tad slower. Like my new computer, my G4 had two bootable OSX drives. On G4 it was OSX 10.3 & 4, oh & OS 9 of course.