Hello all,

I'm no expert and I'm new to this forum (though I have explored in an attempt to find a solution; but the issue I'm having is not a 'steady-state' kind of problem, so I didn't hold out much hope). I have been using Limewire for years, and various things before that, right back to Napster in the good old days. I'm using Limewire Pro (latest version) on Mac OS X 10.4 (also up to date). I have 512/128 satellite broadband all in perfect working order, but for the first time since I started using Limewire, I've noticed a serious and dramatic drop in the number of hits from a search over the last week or so. This is consistent, no matter what I search for or how many searches I perform.

If I type 'Deep Purple' into the Artist field of the Audio Search section, I'm lucky to get seven or eight hits. Maybe one person, or at most two, is offering 'Smoke on the Water', a song which would normally be offered by many dozens of sources. There will be one each of three or four other Deep Purple songs - and that's it! The entire 'hit list' would have been in the hundreds up until this sudden change. I use Deep Purple as an example because I've been doing searches on them on and off for several months now, so I know what to expect, but the same applies to any other artist I search for; sometimes there are no hits at all, whereas usually all sorts of 'close' and spam results come in. I'm not even getting the spam any more, and I've been swamped by it for ages, in ever-changing forms. The incoming searches, which used to come flying through so fast I could never read them, now come in at a crawl.

I haven't changed any of my settings or added any filters. I'm behind a firewall on my machine, but it has the appropriate hole punched in it for Gnutella, and turning it off makes no difference.

I'm getting the 'Turbocharged' reading on the connection meter. I'm a leaf node, and I'm getting the usual number of connections, which all seem to be functioning.

All other internet app's are functioning normally, and my network speed meter is showing normal network speeds.

Given the distributed nature of the Gnutella network, I haven't been able to guess at what could suddenly affect the number of hits so dramatically. If it had a central server arrangement as Napster did, then ...

Has anyone else noticed a recent change for the worse in their hit rate?