LimeWire's download behaviour is less aggressive than the behaviour of other clients. While other clients might keep hammering the same host for a file, even if it claims not to have found the file or if it doesn't respond at all to a connection request, LimeWire will just stop. Now if a remote host simply drops a connection for no apparent reason (e.g. because of a bug in the remote client - you will run into those bugs more frequently when downloading chunks), LimeWire unlike other clients, will think it is impossible to download from that host. LimeWire has always done this. I've been pretty successful downloading small files (up to 50-60mb's) from LimeWire. Very large files have never worked well, - they work better if you are using a more aggressive client like Shareaza or BearShare but they don't work really well with any gnutella client at all. The main problem is that people don't share big files on gnutella. If you want to download movies for example you use Kazaa or eDonkey, and thus you will share them on Kazaa or eDonkey. I've been sharing a very popular movie for two weeks on gnutella, and although at least three or four uploads reached 100% (I've got only 128kbit upstream) I've never seen a copy of my file again anywhere on gnutella.

With the current GUI problem you will never see a 2.8.5 user complete an upload in the 2.8.5 upload view, - the uploads do complete, however. The 2.8.5 user will download chunks of 100k and after each chunk the progress bar in the upload view shows 0% again. THIS DOES NOT REALLY AFFECT THE UPLOADS.