1. Because you are a client of an ultrapeer - the ultrapeers do not report the number of hosts to clients.

2. The number of active connections depends on your bandwidth - each connections takes up some bandwidth. Ideally, you want more connections while you are searching and fewer if you are downloading (although LimeWire does occasional autosearches for new hosts while you are downloading). However, whatever figure you put in there - LimeWire always defaults to 3 when you start up - you must manually modify this after startup to increase it (this is a feature, not a bug).

3. I guess - but more important is the rate of increase - a greater rate of increase indicates a more active connection - except the Morpheus ultrapeers do less reporting - so they can provide good search results with less I/O (I/O stands for Input/Output).

4. It doesn't have to - but since you are a client connecting to an ultrapeer, it almost always will (ultrapeers do not look for new clients).

5. There have been vociferous arguments over this. You are probably best of deciding for yourself - notice when you have a good connection (search results) and note what clients are connected. Similarly for bad connections. In my opinion - there are no particularly bad clients. I will occassionally prune an ultrapeer if it is a very old version or if the I/O is very low compared with a client of the same type (remember - LimeWire does more reporting than morpheus - so will, on average, have greater I/O - for the same quality of searches).

6. Ultrapeers are large bandwidth clients that shield low bandwidth clients from some of the overhead of running the network.

General - read all of the LimeWire forums for as far back as you can stand. You'll get a good overview of LimeWire and the gnutella network. There are any number of tips and tricks that may be useful for the way you use LimeWire (Using LimeWire to download video is often quite a different experience to downloading audio which is different to programs).

Mark