Well for one glorious moment I thought it was fixed. First, I tried going to the mac system prefs and setting the firewall to allow the port 6346 (by the way, i'm not actually behind a firewall and never have been--should I be??). That didn't do anything. Then I went to the limewire advanced preferences/firewalls and ports menu and made sure the numbers matched (they did--both 6346). then i decided what the heck, i know that's supposedly the correct default port number but maybe i should just try the one that stief mentioned. so i put in 6348 and for about five glorious seconds it connected to exactly one IP address. then it disconnected again. now it is back to doing nothing on both 6346 and 6348. AAAHHH.

why oh why won't it just work?

maybe next i will try the link stief mentioned....