Does Limewire know or care in what mode osx is launched? eg in saftey mode or even something as simple as 'default' mode

(by default mode i mean the option to not load the _users_ startup/login items not the _system_ startup items ... fyi: this is accomplished with the shift key /after/ the kernel has loaded, while the progress bar is being completed)

my downloads.dat/bak files have been nuked (which Limewire does to me at the worst possible times) -- and i am trying to figure out the reason why! ...

normally, Limwire will destroy the .DAT/.BAK files if they are open when Limewire quits in an unstable manner -- crashes are not so frequent but (alas) Limewire is notorious for hanging (for hours or days at a time!), with the resultant forced-quit.

however, in recent versions Limewire has proven (marginally) more resiliant to forced-quits, so usually there is NOT catastrophic data loss after a hang is terminated; thus i want to examine another possibility that involves a subtler interaction between LM and osx ... namely the launch state of osx (in this case in 'default' mode).

here is the aspect of the LM interaction that is a bit indirect:

tvshows.sf.net is a torrent tracker which integrates with Limewire - it allows users to be put on a 'wait list' for new torrents to which they subscribe ...

tvshows.app will then automatically launch the default torrent client (eg Limewire) when a torrent becomes available.

however, tvshows.app binds torrent files to a _specific_ version of Limewire -- so if you have more than one copy of Limewire installed (eg a stable release and a beta release), then the designated (and maybe obsolete) version of Limewire is activated when tvshows notifies LM of a new torrent (only in the 'deafult' start-up mode?)

normally, launching a different (older) version of LM would not be a big deal, since different versions of Limewire should respect the same "downloads.dat/bak" files, so all the old downloads in progress should still be (re)loaded into that instance of Limewire.

however, in this case - by coincidence - tvshows.app launched Limewire at the exact moment just as i had restarted osx in 'default' mode (ie skip login/startup items for my user account) ....

and the DAT/BAK control files had been wiped by (some version of) Limewire.

so: what i am trying to determine is whether the restart into osx's 'default' mode meant that // older application bindings // for the (newly arrived) torrent were being used instead of the 'normal' data bindings (which would have presumably launched the 'current'/normal version of Limwire) .... and if this launch/binding order is an expected part of osx behavior then does limewire properly anticipate it? .... and even if the 'wrong' version of limewire is launched anyways, would the difference in osx startup mode effect how limewire (whether the older version or newer one) would handle the (corrupt?) dat/bak control files?


or: is the osx launch state merely a coincidence? ...

ie: is the loss of the control files NOT due to some subtle interaction between LM and osx at all?! ... but instead due to the general stability problems Limewire has always experienced? -- which IMO is due to the on-going lack of diligence and attention to detail at Limewire, as well as the lack of project management foresight to use UML as the engineering S.O.P. ?

personally, i resent the colossal waste of my time duplicating the search for names of all the files orphaned by Limewire (which represents many hundreds of hours of tedious manual data entry) ...as well as the waste of my disk space (hundreds of gigabytes that i have been forced to archive to preserve the crashed entrails left behind by Limewire, in the vain hope that one day i would be able to figure out how to make them come back to life!) ... not to mention all the lost bandwidth that those hundreds of gigabytes of orphaned files represent!

some insight would be appreciated into the cause of this most recent Limewire destruction of my control files.

thanx.