Regardless of whether your firewalls have been de-activated, might I suggest you configure them to give LW full access. But it's generally advisable to only have one firewall active since they can interfere with each other; instructions here: http://www.limewire.com/english/content/firewalls.shtml

Try manually connecting. Go to Tools>Options>Connections & untick option & press Apply button. Then go to menu File>Disconnect. Wait a minute, then go File>Connect & wait for up to 30 mins for it to connect. Try this a few times.

If that fails try deleting your LW Preferences folder whilst LW is closed; instructions here: Fixes for Limewire & do the same as above. LW can sometimes take a while to connect & initially needs time to load shared & incomplete files.