herptile, thank you for posting a detailed synopsis of your situation. I do hope someone at LimeWire gives you a meaningful response.
10.2 is supposed to feature an improved Java machine. I hope that improvement, plus more improvements to LimeWire, will make this program usable soon. After constant crashes, I finally disabled my ultrapeer capability and that seems to have quieted down most of my problems.
Yet it still consumes a huge chunk of cpu while running Top from the Terminal. If you run Sherlock in the background, try quitting that. It also eats processor cycles.