I checked the size of my Limewire file on my hard drive and it's somewhere
around 15 megs. When I boot up the program the "About This Computer"
shows Limewire as occupying about 30 megs of space! Is this due to the
library? I'm downloading everything to a folder on my desktop to make it
easily accessable for players, etc. and the library recognises this folder. If
it is the library that is bloating the app.....is there any where I can move it
so that the app isn't hogging all the ram?? TIA for any advice.

The "About This Computer" dialog tells you how much RAM your currently running applications are using. It has nothing to do with how much space on your hard drive your files (whether they be programs or documents like MP3s) are using. On Macs, if you click once on a file or folder, then either select "Get Info" from the File menu or use the keyboard shortcut [Apple/Command] + [i] you will get a smaller dialog that tells you how much space on your hard drive that object is occupying (among other useful information).

Your hard drive is a type of ROM (Read-Only Memory) as opposed to RAM (Random Access Memory). More RAM generally improves your computers performance by allowing more programs to be open simultaneously, etc., whereas ROM only determines how much stuff you can store.

RAM and ROM are both types of memory and therefore are measured in similar units (k or kb, MB, GB, etc) ... but otherwise two different beasts altogether. Hope this helps.

I guess I didn't explain myself very well. Limewire is sucking up all my ram
to the point, now, that I can't do much else while I'm downloading. I have
128mb of ram on my imac and now my Limewire app is using almost 60mb
of space. Add os8.6 at about 40mb and I don't have enough space to even
open a web browser. Do I need to move my downloads to a different file
that Limewire won't recognize as a library? How will this affect subsequent
downloads as larger libraries tend to give you easier access to other peoples'
music?? TIA for any help.

Lime is a java application, and java needs memory, too

reduce the memory of your webbrowser or buy more mem, it's at this time cheapier than a role toilet paper :-)