In LimeWire under OS X: This evening while I was downloading a 100,000 K .sit file, the download began to hang. By this I mean the Status bar continues to read Downloading from 011.011.011.001 (or whatever), but the Speed consistantly indicates 0. Unfortunately, on large files, I've found that this is not uncommon. The reason isn't clear to me, but I found a manual solution that works well!

I found by accident that I can rekindle a download by doing another search with the same text as contained in the name of the download. Often, I'll have to run multiple searches of the same text (for example searching for Atari, then again searching for Atari, in quick succession). The first one will accumulate some (21) results, while the second one might accumulate (74), or vice-a-versa. Then I'll highlight the versions that match the one that's hanging for me, and it will continue to download. What's up with that? I don't know entirely, but I'm happy it's working for me. I've done this several times now with different files.

The nice thing about this is that it often will gain speed! That is, while before LimeWire was able to download from one source at an average of 9-15 K, when rekindled in the way described above, it frequently found two sources from which to download (reaching 30-60 k average). The status bar reads: Downloading from 2 hosts.

I want to share this, but I also think it might be useful as an automated feature of LimeWire in the future. That is, periodically, a file that's currently downloading will run it's own search for the same file (either in the background or not), in order to rekindle a download that's running faint.