I know others have posted about this and I believe I have read them and did what they say. I uninstalled, I reinstalled, I did beta I did compatibility thing I did the Run As Administrator thing, I got Java again, but whenever I click on the startup thing, it doesnt work! I have WinXP...sooooo..i dont know any more, its really irritating me though.

Have you done a system check? Check your system over with your utilities & clean up your registry.

Also defragment your HDD. How much ram do you have? So you tried the Repair using add/remove control panel?

Last resort would be to try to install the international (multilingual) version of LW. I don't normally recommend this b/c it forces LW to use an almost obsolete version of Java. ALternatively try an older version: http://www9.limewire.com:82/download/

I hope you configured your firewalls to allow LW access: http://www.limewire.com/english/content/firewalls.shtml

Would the firewall stuff prevent it from even loading/starting?

It seems like I am having the same problem. LimeWire starts and then about 3 seconds after the interface comes up, it disappears.
The computer does not crash and there are no error messages. I re-installed and made all the changes to the firewall that are on the Limewire support page. But I can't get it to run.
When I installed the program everything seemed to install OK with no glitches.
Very frustrating

Use one of these versions of Java: Java 1.4.2 (click on link) OR Java 1.5 (take the JRE)

Apparently one version of Java does better than the other version on some people's systems.

LW 4.4.1 came out yesterday to fix some of the installation issues.

Ladies and Gentleman, that certainly fixed it, being whatever it was. The beta version that is.