I went ahead and checked out some of the post about optimum online and some of the alternatives. I went ahead and attempted the thw how sock v5, Manual Port Forward mumbo jumbo and that didn't come through for me. I just gave the guys from my ISP a call about the issue and to see if they were blocking gnutella ports and specificaly limwire, but the rep said that as far as he knew they weren't blocking anything. He said that the issue was pushed up to higher mgmt, but he never got a reply back from them. The ISP rep. mention that he had a ton of calls the past months about the same issue. He happened to be from Long Island and he said HIS Limewire was working well. It looks like I'm just out of my eighteen dollars. Time to blow the dust off and see if I can still squeeze a little more time out of my old pal Grokster. Thanks for your support man, but rest assured I'll still keep on working with limewire - I hate wasting money.