Scully, I have to admit that maybe this time your scientific reasoning wins.

So let's follow this argument through:

1. Tens of thousands of kids going back to school move their computer from home to the dorm room.

2. The home IPs held in hostcaches suddenly become redundant and when people start up Limewire they can't lock on to a host as many of those listed are now inactive.

3. Those affected are mainly in North America since apart from the central host-caches , Limewire also has a local hostcache (gnutella.net in the Limewire folder) containing a list of [stable] hosts that Limewire has encountered. I assume that these would preferably be from geographically neighbouring IPs, so that people in the USA or Canada where the computer shifting phenomenon is on a very large scale would be heavily affected while those in other parts of the world (such as Europe) where this does not happen to the same extent would not be seriously affected.

4. The situation is aggravated by the failure of router.limewire.com

5. Other clients such as Shareaza, Gnucleus (and clones such as Morpheus) have decentralised hostcache systems (GWcache and Lynn cache) and so are not affected.

6. Meanwhile, since many schools block port 6346 [and sometimes others], the school kids change their port number to try and circumvent this.

Sounds plausible to me.