Freezing, Freezing, Freezing

In the Feedback thread there are a couple of comments about freezing in WinME--but no helpful responses. Hoping to hear ideas & solutions by starting a new thread. My Gnotella is freezing in 98 and behaving strangely, in general!

I just discovered Gnotella this week--it was working fine once I got the hang of it (yes, to the complainers, many files could not be accessed, but many could be--so I thought it was great).

Yesterday--not having read the info on the unremovable message about newer version--I uninstalled and reinstalled. That's when the program became more unstable. It no longer wishes to be relegated to the background (reduced to the W task bar)--won't even respond and bring up right click "restore" option.
And it no longer "wishes" to have anything else running! (like right now--when I came over to write this message (this morning it also freezes when I play music at the same time!)--I go back and first, it's not even listed as an open program & then when I get back to it by reducing everything else, it's frozen stuck again--for the 10th time this morning.

I also started having connection problems yesterday--for the first time--but read here about using the gnutella.hostscache.com:6346 address -- that worked great last night but not today. (But thank you to the person--oh I see that was Cyclocide, Adminstrator-- who provided that info--it was sooo.......helpful....somehow about 75% of my selections downloaded quickly and flawlessly, as opposed to about 5% previously. However, my experience so far has been that if I can't connect with gnutellahosts.com:6346, I also can't connect with the other suggestion of router.limewire.com:6346 )

Any solutions appreciated--but I won't comprehend too much jargon--just "lay person" language!!!
Thanks--I'm hoping to get back to the fun soon!