Not sure if this is new advice, but here goes:
To see what hosts are connected, use LW's View menu to turn on "Connections." Then the tab that shows connected hosts should be available.

Hosts can be removed (and new ones should take their place). If some of those hosts are spammers, you'll not get many decent results.

In addition, take a look at the Options for junk filters. See if setting to show all results (including junk) changes the results you see. Just a thought that your junk or keyword filters may be blocking too many results before they show on your screen.

Hi stief, thanks for the help - the junk things not an issue. I added the connections tab (didn't know how to do that, thanks a bunch on that one!).

How many connections should I be looking at? Seems like the paltry six that I've had going the last couple of days isn't right. They're all UPs, but still. Seems a little weird to me. I got rid of all the hostile lists for now and once again deleted my preferences file and went through set up all over again and it still only has oh, now it's four connections. That just seems wrong, eh? Oh, and I did my check on how many connections I had at six in the morning, lunch time, dinner time, about 11 at night and 2 in the morning. So it doesn't seem to be a time of day issue.