I was encountering the same problem as the orriginal poster when upgrading to 2.8 ... occasionally Limewire would crash HARD, an error dialog with an exception would pop up, but the whole app would look up before there was any time to look at the exception.

When someone in this thread mentioned that it's not unusal for Limewire to use several hundred threads/processes I figured out what theproblem is...

Dependig on what Linux kernel you are using, and how your system is configured there may be a hard limit on the total number of processes allowed per user, or for the whole system.

Aparently, in Limwire versions <2.8, Limewire rarely needs more then 256 processes ... i say this, becuase i almost never had this problem with Limewire 2.7, even though my shell was conifugred to only allow me to use 256 processes.

depending on whhch shell you use, you should look into either the "limit" or "ulimit" commands. You should also search for "PAM" which is an administration tool that allows root to set hard limits on users regardless of what they set in their shell.

HOWEVER, on top of all of this, is the possibility of an evern more dominating limit ... aparently in teh Linux 2.2.x kernels, there is an absolute hard limit 512 processes for the whole system. (this can be changed at compile time, but the fact remains -- there is a hard limit which can't be changed without recompiling the kernel.)