#3 response above worked for me. thanks for suggesting it! i was able to download files and limewire was otherwise working, but i got the error message when doing searches that reads something about you are not connected. i followed the steps above, re-opened limewire, and it's running again for the first time in weeks. i was getting this error and ran the free update. that didn't fix it. but the steps here did. the one tricky thing is that the file you download looks more like a web-page with code written out. but when you save it, it's called the right file name.