Limited/Unrelated Search Results

[PickaxeFairy]

Have been using Limewire for ages and never had a problem. Now, completely out of the blue, it's started behaving really strangely.
I have full connection, i.e. all the green bars are present and there is no firewall blocking.... only now when i type in a search, I either get a whole list of completed unrelated items or if any related items are to come up, there's only a handful as opposed to a whole load, which I've always had before.
I appreciate there are other posts/threads relating to this, but on searching through them, a lot appear to be relating to lack of connection and this doesn't appear to be the problem in my case.
I have unticked the 'Connect on start-up' tab.

This is driving me mad, as I just cannot fathom out any solution; it sounds to me like it could be something to do with the filtering content aspect, but if it is, how on earth do I rectify it??

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Curmudgeon]

I have (in the last 4-6 weeks) been seeing a similar problem -- apparently an excellent connection, but very few search results returned, even for search terms that should have had many results. (I have not had the problem of unrelated results.)

I tried running two limewire processes (as two different users) simultaneously, and found that one was returning few or no results while the other had many results for the same search terms. Interestingly, when looking at the "Connections" panel, most of the ultrapeers that the first one was connected to had high "Dropped I/O" rates (50-60%), while those that the second one was connected to had much lower Dropped I/O rates (20%-30%). I don't know whether this is the reason for the few search results the first one returned, or just a coincidence.

Anyway, now what I do is to go and manually remove ultrapeers that have high Dropped I/O rates. When I do this, the quality of my searches seems to go up as well. Again, I don't know whether this is a causal effect or just a coincidence.

FWIW, I'm running a modified version of Limewire v 4.14 (modified to connect to 8 ultrapeers) on Fedora Core 9 Linux.