The official LW 2.9.8 does indeed work alright, at least it's not worse than previous versions. Maybe it's because of the way I download files. I always try to make my searches as specific as possible (the new search system will return better results for more specific searches) and download three or four versions of the file I want. Then I re-check half an hour or an hour later and search for failed downloads again.

I've found that there are a couple of other tricks to achieve a better success rate when downloading (but it's not such an earth-shaking improvement as you may think): I set the download timeouts higher in the source code and I set up LimeWire to retry sources if the http transfer stopped unexpectedly or if LimeWire could not parse the http header correctly.

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Morgens ess ich Cornflakes und abends ess ich Brot
Und wenn ich lang genug gelebt hab, dann sterb ich und bin tot

--Fischmob