If you have a lot of incompletes & shares, it can extend connection time. Let's hope this was what was caused the extended connection time.

Another thing you can do is go to preferences, Connections I think it is & disable automatically connect. Then next time you open LW, let it settle for 10+ mins & then go to File menu -> Connect.

Tip: Purge the Downloads Queue! (click on blue link) can help here too.

Considering the sizes others have mentioned that might cause problems, I doubt it--I'm currently sharing 367 files, the maximum I've ever had being something like 420ish, and my incomplete listing has never exceeded 100 (most likely a bit less than that as I'm guesstimating). But, to be sure, I deleted everything in my Incomplete Files and Downloads queue window, so they've been clean as a whistle for several weeks now.

Something I already do after having read another thread suggesting this.

Seems I was right to be cautiously optimistic last night, as after having a turbo connection for a few hours I then lost all but one connection. Trying again tonight but getting nothing. *sigh*

One thing I've noticed, I don't know if it means anything, but potential host connections used to go to just 6 seconds, sometimes 7 seconds, in the Time column before dropping. Now I see a number of them go to twice that. Any idea why?

By the way, when I was trying the 'replace gnutella.net file' suggestion to see if it would get LimeWire to connect, I kept running into a strange problem where the file was saved as an MPEG-1 Video file. I tried several different links provided here on the forums, and each time it was the same: I clicked the link, a pop-up window informed me I'm trying open a BINARY file and asked what I want to do, I clicked the 'Save File' button and got a file named gnutella.net with a QuickTime MPEG icon on it. I ended up downloading it on a Windows machine and transferring the file to my Mac to get a usable copy of it. I've never encountered anything like this before; have you any idea why it happened?

That is a strange phenomenon that happens on mac osx. Some of my LW prefs files or incomplete preferences (download.dat & .bak) may adopt any particular icon. It varies between people's machines as to which icon it takes on. lol It should make no difference to LW's use of the file though. Just that OSX is unable to decide what type of file it is.

So, still can't really connect and have no idea why. I got one host connection for about a hour last week--don't recall the day--when it promptly dropped, and then I couldn't get anything. Have been working back through the suggested fixes AGAIN and getting nowhere. *sigh* Disconnected and reconnected LimeWire, nothing. (I do not have tips showing at startup and always manually start the connections rather than having the program do it on startup.) Replaced the gnutella.net file and restarted my computer, nothing. Twice. Rechecked that I have the latest/most up-to-date Java (I do). Deleted my preferences and restarted the computer and then LimeWire, nothing. Changed my listening port, nothing.

Okay, so now I'm on the verge of being pissed that I can't figure out and fix what's wrong because it seems to be just this machine/this version/my settings. I tried out 4.16.3 Pro on a MacBook Pro and had 5 connections within 10 SECONDS right out of the box, as it were. But when I changed all the preferences and settings so they matched what I'm using on the iBook running 4.12.11 Pro, I made just 1 connection that took close to a minute to get established, and then less than two minutes later it dropped. Another 5 minutes or so after that the program made another single connection, and that's going 12 minutes strong (also the time it took to exhaust the available host list). *heavy sigh* So my connection problems have nothing to do with our router or ISP; it's something else altogether, but I don't know what. AAAAGGGGHHHHH!!

Could this a case of the new version somehow screwing the old versions?? I should have looked to see what that momentary connection was with, but the second single connection was 4.14.10. Just when did 4.16 come out, around last November?

I think I have it figured out, and yes, it seems we older version users are quite screwed.

I first changed just the port forwarding number to what had initially appeared in 4.16.3's preferences to see if my 5 connections would come back, but that didn't help. Then I remembered the extra connection stuff which appears in that version's Advanced>Performance area, so I decided to see what they would do in conjunction with my old port forwarding number. I changed it back and then unchecked the option to 'Disable Mojito DHT Capabilties.' It didn't help. But as soon as I unchecked the 'Disable TLS Capabilities'--I didn't even have to click 'Apply' or 'OK'--I saw the host listings appear in the Connections view and my 5 connections were made within seconds. (Previously I've had the GUI minimized while I was changing preferences so I couldn't see it happening.) Mind you I also have the option to connect immediately on startup disabled, so I don't understand how it could even begin to do that without my choosing the connect option from the File menu, but anyway...

Rechecking 'Disable Mojito DHT Capabilities' had no effect on my ability to immediately connect. So it's this secure communications mode that is wreaking havoc on people like me who aren't using a version equipped with the TLS capabilities. And it sucks.

I'm also seeing that the network is a bit less stable than it used to be, because I went through half a dozen drop-and-add connections in just three minutes, and that never used to happen to me so close to start up. (I used to see after a couple of hours that just two of my hosts had connect times which matched that, while the other three would be something along the lines of 30-45 minutes for two of them and 10-20 minutes for the last one.)