Greetings lindsayp and welcome to the Gnutella forums.

I don't know of any way to contact a host.

I had an experience very similar to yours. After waiting weeks to connect to the host, I looked for the file on torrent sites and was able to download it within a few hours (it was a movie from '68).

While LW is not a very good torrent client, it can download them. You can do a Google search for your file on torrent sites. When you find the file, you should see a "download this torrent" button somewhere on the page; click it. A download window should open; click on "open" (Not "save") and you should then see the file appear in your LW downloading window.