I have no problems with running the Lime Wire program. NO connection problems, down or ups. What I do question is:

After I close and exit the program, I get 1000's of illegal hits to my firewall (Zone Alarm) that it blocks. Restart doesn't change it. Shutdown doesn't change it. If I don't sign onto the gnutella network for couple days, it settles back to a "normal" amout of illegal hits of around 20 a day. These massive amount of hits can go on for 24,35,48 hours and in one or two cases longer. What's going on????

Your IP address is sent to the other clients to which you connect. I believe it also gets recorded by the connection servers as an active client. Your IP is then passed around to other clients looking for network connections. When you first connect to the network your IP address is "fresh" and is handed out more often because it's more likely you're still connected. After a while your address drops further and further down the list and is eventually no longer handed out. That's why the hits gradually drop off over the course of the next few days.

This has nothing specifically to do with LimeWire. It's the way gnutella is designed to work.

Thanks. That sounds reasonable. I have a vast prior career in DP, just nothing current in networking -- that's why I asked (kind of suspected something like that might be happening . . .). Lime is the only software I use, so I just referenced it by what I knew. Again thanks for the explanation.

I'm also using ZoneAlarm.
I know LimeWire uses port 6347, but ZA only can allow applications. (Since there is no LimeWire application.) Which application is listening on port 6347?

ZA is monitoring 6346. As I said, I dont know much about networks or Gnutella. It "apears" to be blocking it by DHCS and perhaps through my Ethernet card. It "looks like" it's getting a request from a remote server and there is nothing running to answer the request. bTW, I'm running WIN2K-P that has a way of doing all sorts of things. These hits are showing up in the systems log.

The firewall has blocked Internet access to your computer (TCP Port 6346) from 172.195.218.147 (TCP Port 4566) [TCP Flags: S].

LimeWire runs under the Java runtime, javaw.exe. Unless you're running a lot of other Java programs you don't want getting through the firewall, you should be able to set javaw as the program fielding 6346 and 6347.

I've allowed javaw.exe and ZA detects the use of port 6346. But not 6347, for which I do get blocked messages... I even got a blocking for 6348 - which is used for what?

Rgds, Chris.