hopping connections
 

What's the deal with LimeWire now? The past two versions (I'm now on version 2.9.6) suck at maintaining connections.

Regardless of how many connections I utilize, they are always dropping. Makes it impossible to download anything of size, since inevitably I lose the connection within 30 minutes.

Is anybody experiencing this and is there anything that can be done (short of finding an older version) to correct it?

If your connection is under heavy stress (especially if you are using the upstream to its limits) your connections become very instable.

good point, but this happens even when i'm downloading nothing. I've started and just watched the connections to see, and it still hops with no downloads stressing it out.

It will also happen when the remote host is very busy. - The LimeWire team could write a workaround for this by retrying hosts although the connection has failed. BearShare does so but for certain reasons LimeWire chose not to do that because of a (in my opinion very remote) possibility of being used for DDoS attacks.