Problems with connecting to the network

I own a Macintosh iBook G4, with wireless internet, and am having a weird problem with Limewire, I've had Limewire for a long time on my computer and it's never done this before until a few days ago. When I go to use the search a message pops up saying that "Limewire is currently connecting to the network. Your search may not return as many results until you are fully connected to the network."
But it hasn't seemed to connect to the network at all. None of my searches have come up with any results and when I used the show/hide thing to show connections, there are no connections appearing at all. Also I don't know if this has anything to do with this problem but Limewire has unexpectly quit a couple of times today. I really don't know what happened cause it has always worked fine before and now in the last day or so I can't use it. Any help with this would be much appriciated!!

I know how to use a firewall. I am using Zone Alarm's free firewall right now. I tried shutting down Zone Alarm's Firewall and adding limewire to windows firewall. It still doesn't work. I basically had only windows firewall running for a firewall and added it to the firewall list and it still won't connect. I also added limewire while running zone alarm. And I checked allow every time it asked me if I wanted to allow something. Limewire just doesn't seem to ever connect. Every time I try to search for something the program tells me that limewire is still connecting. I tried uninstalling, then reinstalling the program more than once still nothing. Never mind it suddenly started to work. I don't know why but it works now.

1. Delete LW prefs folder; Deleting LW Preferences folder in OSX

2. (a) If LW Will Not Connect, __
(b) Problems with the search, __ (c) Hostiles List

3. Make sure UPnP is enabled on your wireless router. If it doesn't support UPnP then you will need to forward a port.

4. After opening LW, go to preferences (keyboard shortcut: Deleting LW Preferences folder in OSX) -> Connections & disable Connect on start up. Then go to File menu ... Choose disconnect or connect. So after opening LW, wait 10 mins & connect via the File menu.

I didn't know Zone Alarm made a mac version firewall. woot!

Zone Alarm doesn't have a mac version firewall. I don't think that they have a Mac version of any of their software. When you go to the download page for Zone Alarm. It says that most of the Zone Labs software is for Windows 2000/ or Windows XP only. And some of them support Windows Vista. The free version of their firewall supports Windows Vista.