Any advice on a workaround, either for the main problem or the chat problem, would be appreciated. I tried searching the forum and got more than 2,000 posts back; a quick scan of about 100 of them shows no info on these problems:

Limewire fails to recognize a character I use in my file names to separate Artist & Title (the long dash). Limewire changes my dash to a question mark, then tells you the file is "not available" when you try to DL it. I'm not going to change this character on all 14,500 of my mp3 files! Limewire should fix the bug (which I've not seen covered in any FAQ). I reported the bug but got to reply. All my files do have the suffix .mp3, by the way.

Chat problem:

As a result of the phoney "file not found," many of you have tried to send me a chat to ask why you cannot download a certain file. I am unable to reply to your chat because your message automatically changes to the words "Host Unavailable" in red--apparently another Limewire bug, which is not covered in any FAQ that I have read. I have NEVER been able to reply to any of the many chats people have sent.

If Limewire would get serious about a proper Mac version, maybe these problems would be cured. At this point, I don't know whether to be angry, or grateful that it at least provides SOMEthing for the Mac--which is more than can be said for many other downloading programs.

Thanks for any advice you may have about any of this. Oh, I have also tried to change my profile to allow people to see my email address, but cannot find any way to do this under "Revise profile." Anyone wishing to send a private response may email me at xvisitor@mindspring .com

Thanks!

There are other characters that Limewire cannot accept from a Mac: [] for example. The m-dash — apparently is one of them. There are share/freeware programs at versiontracker that can batch rename files if you wish to make a concession to Limewire's idiosyncratic nature.

Chat is a very iffy thing on Limewire, and the chat connection can break quite quickly. There is no warning; the other person simply fails to respond. They in fact do not see what you have written.

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions, and thanks for the tip about the existence of batch programs for changing file names. Larry