Alright, last night I was using limewire last night just fine. I downloaded a song by *** (no I am not kidding). All was good. So today, I get on limewire and I can only connect to 171 servers ("hosts", whatever) when normally I connect to a thousand or more. I figure the problem is that I'm using too old of a version of limewire so I update to 4.16.6. Now I can't connect to any servers and it says I'm behind a firewall.

Eventually, I figure that either (a) I'm having a router issue or (b) my provider (Cox) is blocking my access.

So I have two questions.

If it is a router issue, how to I solve it on 4.16.6

If it is a provider issue, how can I bypass it? I've read about proxies but somehow I'm pretty sure I'm not grasping the idea or it would be working.

It would really blow if I couldn't get limewire to work because in addition to "usual" activity I use it for plenty of uhh... legitimate means... like downloading manuals, pictures (not those kind of pictures), and sound effects / clips for media projects. In the end, if I can't get limewire to work, is there any alternative (like going back to 4.12 or something)?

Actually this is the exact same issue I am having: suddenly I am behind a firewall. A firewall that did not exist a couple days ago.