There seems to be some naysayers out there about these connection problems. I went looking for help earlier and I just couldn't find anything. Noone is talking about the obvious. If you can't find the network, you can't get on it, simple. I use limewire at internet cafes and so I have to install and reinstall everytime. I lost my old copy so I downloaded a new one and it just doesn't work.

There are two problems.

1)The newest version doesn't have a .limewire preferences folder. It would be nice to know where it is.

2)Also the beauty and the ugly of the gnutella network is that it is needs to know other peers on the internet. This makes it impossible to shutdown once people connect, but it makes it harder to connect to in the first place. The gnutella peers list that comes with gnutella is out of date and just about useless.

So if you have an older version, 4.6 works for this fix, here is what you do. Go to the .limewire folder and then click on the gnutella.net file, open it in a text editor, Crimson Editor if you have it or notepad is fine, dont open in wordpad. If you don't know why, then maybe you should be attempting this.

Make sure that Limewire is completely shutdown before attempting this fix.

Once you open the gnutella.net file, you need to actually add some peers to it. The peers listed in the one that comes with the Limewire download aren't active or at least they weren't for me. I waited more than an hour. I pulled these sites off of another thread listing gwebcache servers. I edited my gnutella.net file and within 3 minutes I had a connection and in about 30 seconds more I had an excellent connection. And this was done working behind a proxy server.

Here is the list of servers to add:
http://gwc2.mine.nu:3333/
http://toadface.bishopston.net:3558/
http://cache.kicks-***.net:8000/
http://www.deepnetexplorer.co.uk/webcache/
http://crab.bishopston.net:3558/
http://gwc.mine.nu:3333/

http://gwc1.nouiz.org/servlet/GWebCache/req
http://gwcrab.sarcastro.com:8001/
http://goeg.dk/Gnutella/gcache.php
http://gcache.sexter.com:8080/gwc/
http://abacustechnology.net:8000/
http://crab2.dyndns.org:8002/gwc/
http://gwc.nonamer.ath.cx:8080/
http://gwc.jooz.net:8010/gwc/
http://loot.alumnigroup.org/
http://kisama.ath.cx:8080/
http://overbeer.ghostwhitecrab.de/
http://gwebcache.daems.org/GWebCache/req
http://gwc1.mager.org:8081/GWebCache/req
http://www.williams-clan.net/gcache/gcache.php
http://galvatron.dyndns.org:59009/gwcache
http://gwc.lame.net/gwcii.php
http://starscream.dynalias.com/
http://www.goeg.dk/Gnutella/gcache.php
*************face.bishopston.net:3558/
http://www.deepnetexplorer.co.uk/webcache/index.asp
http://krill.shacknet.nu:20095/gwc
http://gwc1c.olden.ch.3557.nyud.net:8090/gwc/
http://gwebcache.koshoid.de/
http://g2cache.theg2.net/gwcache/lynnx.asp
http://gcache.cloppy.net/
http://g1.blacknex.net/cgi-bin/perlgcache.cgi
http://gwebcache2.limewire.com:9000/gwc
http://gwc2.nonexiste.net:8080/
http://ygwc.y-0.net/ygwc.php

Those webcaches should get you started eventually. I have more entries, the IP address entries, but since it is like 400 lines long, no sense posting it. And I dont feel comfortable posting IP addresses online.

Also, I suggest that you save your gnutella.net file after a your first time online. That way if it happens again, you can get quickly online. Save it from time to time as well because some sites go away and some come online. Once every two weeks should be fine.