Your quick check against magnetmix shows that your connection/set-up is OK. Your set-up works when connected to "reliable" sources.

The bad results you saw earlier shows that the hosts you connected to aren't very reliable. Control-click the downloads column, and show "vendor:" you might see a pattern.

As for my other two suggestions--sorry: I don't understand what I'm saying much of the time too. Guess I should pay more attention in English classes.

re the "bug report". In the LimeWire preferences, there's a section called "bug reports." If you go there, there's a button labeled "Sample." Click that and you get a screen showing all the key settings. Look for the line that says "accept incoming" to find out if your setup is set for clear gnutella (LimeWire) connections.

As for the Firewall, there is one built into OS X. LW's help menu->Tip of the Day has a tip on how to set it up.