when I download stuff it takes up pretty much all the bandwidth I have available, so I usually don't start the actual downloading until I go to bed. The problem is I usually forget to start everything up and wake up the next morning with nothing downloaded. Is there a way I could set Limewire to automatically start downloading the files I've selected at midnight?

No, I don't think there is.
What do you mean by "I forget to start everthing up"?

Which version of LW are you using? LW 5 is a bit dumb when it comes to getting the files to auto start.

Limewire 5.1.2 is what's on my computer.

When I choose what I want to download, I start downloading it and then pause it. I unpause everything before I go to bed, but I'm not usually near the computer so I forget and leave everything paused the entire night. is there a better way of doing this?

haha no! ... LW does periodically every 15-30 mins recheck all incomplete files & attempts to find hosts for them. Not a heavy effort but at least an effort.

With LW 4, you could cancel all downloads, go to Library window, select all incomplete files & press resume button which would force them back into download window. This was quite effective. However with LW 5 if you cancel a download it actually deletes the incomplete file. Plus there's no technique to resume incomplete files in LW 5 in any similar fashion to LW 4.

Search the topics of the files .. sure might take a few mins, some mins before you go to bed, do several searches for each file ... so they are even still finding results as you go to bed. This will at least help.

With LW 4 you could direct connect if you knew the host's ip address. You could also browse host from search results .. helping to reforce the recognition some hosts found in search results do actually have the files the incomplete files need to restart. You could also cancel a download from search results & re-download ... another technique of force starting a download. Unfortunately, most of these techniques are non existant in LW 5.