Slow Computer problems

I have a very slow computer out of the dark ages! My phone lines are also the pits, this is why I haven't bathered to upgrade the computer.

My computer has a 100Mhz processor with about 40Meg ram. I can get LimeWire to work most of the time but I'm trying to figure out how to optimize it to work with this system with really bad phone lines. I can only connect at 28.8 max.

I've noticed that if I have over three connections and lots of available files I can't find anything when I use the Search function. It seems that when I have maybe two connections and maybe 50Gig with of file I start finding things to down load. Is there a reason for this?

I'm attempting to figure out where things should be set on a slow system so that I can do searches. Downloading is slow but I can do it most of the time. But I'm having a great deal of difficulty doing searches!

Thanks for any ideas you may have!
CatNip!