I've seen this happen occassionally. It usually means that there is some communication problem locally - an excessive number of data packets are being lost.

I think this could be due to the local ISP server being overloaded or doing some housekeeping - or perhaps excessive line noise. I don't think the problem is specific to gnutella - I think it affects all internet communication equally.

Could you check to see if you can browse the web when you next see this problem? - If web sites come up excessively slowly it indicates that the problem is an ISP one, not a LimeWire one (and vice versa, of course).

Mark