I have a new feature request that shouldn't be that difficult Remove every piece of crap software that isn't required for Limewire operation from the install. cough "Gator" cough.

You do not have to install Gator if you do not want to. If you don't like it, don't install it. However, this option is there because the LW team members need to eat and have a roof over their heads too. This software generates a little revenue for them so that they can continue their operations. Did you know that bandwidth costs alone are costing them over $10,000 a month?!
Please try to understand their position...
:-)

Bandwith? For ppl visiting the site or for ppl dl LW? If it is mostly DLs shouldnt they come up with a way to update via the GN?

Yes I would agree they have many different mediums available for them to distribute their application and if it's(limewire) using the gnutella network then there are no charges to them for that. Why don't they distribute over the network and let others host their file no charge there. Also, Limewire went open source last month... They should make a clean build without the spyware/adware attached, then make their own build with the crap and put both binaries up for distribution. I would have been more than happy to donate to their Amazon.com donation site and almost did until I ran the installer and found that limewire was now spyware/adware.

If you download the source code from LimeWire.org, you can modify it, compile it, and presto! You can have an ad-free version of LW. I know that this is a lot more complex than I make it sound, but if you're into Java, you can do it.

Most bandwidth used by LW.com and LW.org does not come from software downloads. Cnet handles that, and so it seperate from this figure.

You know what I really dislike about 1.8? I used adware to kill all the spyware on my system. Now, LW 1.8 opens and promptly crashes while trying to access an non-existent spyware extension on my system. If you try to uninstall 1.8, I got an error message about missing files (I traced them back to either spyware or adware).

If you're uncomfortable with 1.8, use this version:

http://limewire.gnutelliums.com/1.7c/

Perhaps an open-source project will create an ad free version.

Actually, most of it does come from software downloads. All of the download links at Download.com redirect back to LimeWire.

Oops. My bad....
Sorry everyone.
:-)

You can find "LimeWireWin.exe" if you perform a search with any Gnutella client. If there was a more intuitive naming convention, then this could be a viable alternative.

Hey all-

Yeah, we've seriously toyed around with the idea of distributed downloads before. I agree it's a really neat idea with a lot of potential -- it could easily get into doing far more cooperative distriubtion/CPU cycle-sharing-type stuff at some point.

We did not pursue this basically because we were too busy incorporating new features into the program, and we did not foresee at the time that financing would be an issue for us this soon. The major problem with this approach is that people who have never used LimeWire cannot get it this way. It also would be a bit tricky for the non-tech-savvy. On another level, we didn't want to force users to keep the installer on their systems just in terms of hard-drive space, although we might give it some more thought.

We definitely understand everyone's frustrations with the bundled software, but we did not see too many other options (other than losing programmers...) for meeting our current financial needs. We hope that it is a temporary situation and that we start selling our server software by the thousands, but for the time being we have to stick with the bundles and ads out of necessity.

Thanks for everyone's patience on this!