I am slowly getting out of ideas. Two things I can think of that might cause this: The disk your home folder is on is full or you have multiple disks with the same name.

One possible cause is that LimeWire is opened at one point while the external drive isn't connected. If LimeWire senses that the files no longer exist, it purges the hashes of those files. Later, if they drive reconnects, the files will need to be hashed again.

The only possible solution I can think of is to include a count of the number of times we have tried to purge the entry, and if it reaches a certain threshold then the entry is finally removed. Otherwise (if all files were always stored), the size of the list would become extremely large as users moved files to and from various locations on their drive.

There were many problems reported elsewhere with external devices like firewire drives and OSX Panther. Looks like not all have been fixed even by today's update to Panther, judging by the Macintouch reports reports

davideves, any chance the manufacturer has updated drivers on their website or there are settings which allow your external drive to "sleep"?

I know Macs usually just 'work', but looks like you have something unusual going on.

Sam--I noticed you've added jum's patch for the extra backup of fileurns.cache. Will that be in the next beta?

>I noticed you've added jum's patch for the extra backup of fileurns.cache. Will that be in the next beta?

Yes.

I've become confused over my options as the detail is getting more complicated than I can handle. Instead I have searched the mac for all evidence of LW and removed repeating the process a few times. I have now reinstalled and LW did not recognise any previous prefs. LW is now hashing all the tracks again so I shall leave it running in the background for today, leave for a few extra hours to make sure all is OK and then reboot. Hopefully this will fix my repeat hashing problems. I'll keep you updated.

Loaded most of the tracks and rebooted after closing LW. The number of shared tracks immediately went to the point at which I had closed LW suggesting that the hashing problem has been fixed by reinstallation. Many thanks for the support.