If you have recently downloaded and installed the Windows XP Service Pack 2, your connection to the network may fail now with the default settings of the builtin firewall.

(1) If you already have another internal software firewall installed, or an external firewall in your router or on the Internet gateway for your LAN, you may simply avoid many problems by disabling the Windows XP SP2 builtin firewall (using 2 successive firewalls will just make your life more complicate: use and ajust the settings of the main firewall which has a direct connection on the Internet; Note that there's no security enhancement when using two local firewalls on the same hosts; The Windows XP SP2 firewall is still in beta and will prove its stability only in a few months, most probably in 1 or 2 years, and it also depends on another Windows service that you must enable, and is exposed to other security risks: The UPnP agent.

(2) In other cases or if you still want to maintain the builtin firewall, you need to add "exceptions" for the ports needed to get incoming connections or incoming results via UDP in LimeWire. If you have not changed the default LimeWire settings, LimeWire expects to see incoming connections and UDP query/hits traffic on local port 6346. So you'll need to add the following exceptions in the Windows Firewall settings:

* Name: "Gnutella (TCP)", Port 6346, protocol TCP
* Name: "Gnutella (UDP)", Port 6346, protocol UDP
* With some security configurations you may also need to allow the "limewire.exe" application to access the Internet (this can be done the first time you see the Windows Firewall alert that asks you whever LimeWire should connect to the Internet).

The second one is needed to get faster results when querying the network, and allows better sharing of your files.

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