Alright, this is probably a bit late given that the forum took three days to send me an activation email, but I may still be able to help. I got a problem similar to the one you have described spontaneously on Monday of this week. I found this thread while browsing for solutions, alongside attempting to fix it myself.


Firstly, the symptoms:

1) Upon loading Limewire failed to connect to the Gnutella network. The connection status (bottom-left) remained on one bar indefinately. Restarting both Limewire or my computer did nothing to resolve this and I was still able to run all other programs that accessed the internet.

2) Total messages sent to the Gnutella network (Tools -> Statistics -> Advanced -> Gnutella -> Sent -> Number -> Total) was always one, which was sent immediately upon loading. Usually messages are sent around every 12s to maintain an average of 0.08 msgs/s to ensure that Limewire is still connected. This was also true of other message request protocols including those to other clients.

3) Total messages recieved from the Gnutella network (Tools -> Statistics -> Advanced -> Gnutella -> Recieved -> Number -> Total) was always zero. Usually messages are recieved to an average of 0.03 msgs/s.


The deduction:

Given that Limewire was not sending messages as it should be on a regular basis, there must either be some setting within Limewire that is now telling it not to send messages, or Limewire is awaiting a message that is not arriving and so does not continue to attempt a connection with the Gnutella network. The latter may be caused by the initial message not being recieved intact by the network, again possibly due to a local setting. This is naturally speculation as I am not familiar with p2p program methodology.


The cure?

If you have these symptoms (I suggest you check the statistics, although they may be typical of all errors of this type) the first cure I stumbled across was simply to use Limewire's inbuilt Restore Default Settings feature (Tools -> Options -> Restore Defaults [Button at bottom] ). This was irritating as it removed all custom settings, reset the library and required you to go through the first-time startup process again, but it was easier than running through the entire uninstall/reinstall process. Of course if the Limewire exe file is missing (typically stored at; X:\Program Files\LimeWire\LimeWire.exe where X is whatever letter is asigned to your primary hard drive) you may as well use Limewire's installer again.


I hope that helps someone. If you have any questions I will check this thread a couple of times, but since I no longer have the issue I cannot gather any further information with regards to it. Good luck.

Ikara
{The Guiding Light}