Limewire is a shareware project so making any payment is at your discretion and demonstrates your wish to support the work of people who want to produce a good product without the flaws induced by the large corporations. So you can download another copy without paying.

Without getting technical, a large number of those who access Gnutella are not very sociable and do not share. Hence, a large proportion of the hits that show up in your search window will not download to you. Further, because people do not leave their computers on for very long, the topography of connections between all the machines is in permanent flux, so you will often find that your link to a host downloading to you will be disrupted and you have to reconnect by killing the download and restarting it from the original source in the search box.

Yes, there are many media available for sharing but, on a public forum like this, it is an indiscretion to mention an interest in particular copyright protected materials. As to different file sizes, avoid the small files. They tend to be the spoofs. With a little research, you should be able to find out roughly how big the files should be for the materials you are interested in. Remember that most of the world has PCs not Macs if you do decide to search for software and that not everyone makes the complete package available including the code for installation.

There is no etiquette on Gnutella. Everyone brings their own morality and "common sense" to bear. Remember that you cannot use chat until you achieve a live connection and, even if you had a working version, many cable and DSL users leave LW on in the background and do not have pop-ups to warn them of messages. So, even if you could ask, you end up taking a chance.

Good to see you're having fun.

David