Just as an experiment have you tried totally disabling your XP firewall before you open LW to see if you still have the brick wall icon showing?

There's always this option also but not sure if it will make a difference to connections: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/downlo...downloads.html

Thanks for the great info! Do you know of a safe place to download Limewire 4.16? The official site doesn't seem to offer downloads that old.