Hello Sberlin,

I put both of the settings back to their original position to determine, and the answer is that the problem was solved when I changed settings in LW.

The setting is Limewire ->preferences -> advanced -> firewalls -> check the 'force ip' box.

So, to answer your question: "Do you think LimeWire need to be restarted because you changed the computer's preferences while LimeWire was running?"

I think that the answer is that when I forced ip in limewire, I needed to re-start the lw app itself, before the change would take effect.

The reason I think this is because I removed the gnutella/limewire entry that I had made into the computer system's preferences, and was still able to initiate searches, once I had changed the preferences in Limewire. But this was only possible when I quite & re-opened limewire itself.

Please ask me to clarify if this does not make sense. Thanks for improving limewire.