used to be an ultrapeer
 

not any more

why did limewire stop connecting me as an ultrapeer?
I was seeing hundreds of thousands of files being shared,
now it hardly gets to 50k.
This just started a few days ago.
Im new to limewire and this forum so forgive me if this has been addressed before.

From what I gather from these here formus, being a leaf node gets you as many results as an Ultrapeer. You just don't get involved in useless traffic since your connection to the network is not as stable yet. To become an Utlrapeer, one must connect to a set number of peers (or is it Utlrapeers? AUGH! Help!), but I don't think that there is anything you can do to connect to more people aside from staying connected and waiting (they say the longer you wait, the better your connection to the net gets, but I'm not too sure). An Ultrapeer doesn't get more results or better speeds (at least that's what they say here).

I got things cleared up for me (thanks stief!). You have to be connected to a set number of Ultrapeers, who, if you check under statistics are labeled as Peers. If you cannot find enough Ultrapeers, then you become a leaf node, shielded by those Ultrapeers you have managed to connect to.