Hi Mandii_m,

After you deleted LW's preferences folder, did you go through the LW setup wizard all over again?

Did you try both deleting & replacing the gnutella.net file? Deleting it works for some people but others find that the file needs to be replaced

After you disabled performance options & OOB searching, did you make sure to click Apply to save the change?

Did you make sure that you don't have more than 1 Java version installed on your computer?

Let us know if you had trouble with any of the help fixes, or if there were any that you didn't try.

Your router has a firewall. If you don't have port forwarding set up already, you could give that a try. UPnP doesn't seem to be so reilable in some routers. If you'd like to try port forwarding, let me know & I'll give you the info.