hi there,
please note, i am very new to limewire, but i just wanted to share my experience on this stuff, which led to me reading all 19 pages worth of posts yesterday, only to find today that perhaps i never had a problem after all.
i thought i did yesterday because, when trying to download a 350MB avi file, i was stuck at speeds of 0-5KB/s, and this is with a theoretical download speed of around 160KB/s, according to speed tests.
some background for the gurus: i am running mac osx.4.8 and didnt have the firewall switched on, yet limewire was still displaying the brick wall, and in the bug report, "Received incoming this session" said false - which apparently indicates there is some firewall problem. as well as making the config changes suggested by murasame, i tried various things recommended on gnutella forums, such as adding gnutella/limewire to the list of things to allow in my network sharing settings, and setting up NAT-PMP with the airport admin utility as advised here: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...threadid=52014
but this didnt seem to make any difference to the firewall stuff.
i stopped short of taking up the advice to set up manual port forwarding, as it looked like a really complex process, involving (from my understanding) setting up static ip addresses for all computers in the house using the same base station... i didnt want to get into all that, with my very limited IT knowledge.
ANYWAY, to finally get to the point, this morning i tried downloading a few different files at the same time, to see what speeds i could get. amazingly, i found i could get up to around 170KB/s. this was the total download speed of about 5 files simultaneously downloading, some quite fast (ie over 70KB) and others still really slow (ie 3KB). it turned out it wasnt the file type that determined the speed as i had thought (having got up to 100KB with a popular mp3 file) - rather it seemed to be the number of hosts. even a simple mp3 could go very slow when downloading from only 1 host. whereas when i had 7 or 8 hosts, i could get up to 100KB for the avi file - if i paused some other downloads to allow maximum bandwidth for that file.
now this will all be very obvious to many people who've been following this thread, but i just thought it worth putting this info down for anyone like me, who hadnt tried downloading many things, and so perhaps hadnt worked out that the number of hosts may be a big factor determining download speed, rather than a problem with your isp, connection speed, or even limewire configuration.
another thing that occurred to me that may affect download speed for VERY new limewire users, is that if you are only sharing your limewire folder (and therefore, the files that you have downloaded), then to start with, you may have so few files that it is cutting out the number of potential hosts quite significantly (depending on their settings). itd be interesting to see whether chucking a few extra files over into your shared folder would help with this.
anyway, i am - like many others - deeply appreciative to all those more seasoned limewire users who have so patiently replied to all the questions posted here - in many cases, repetitively.
i have learned a great deal by reading this entire thread (and those referenced here), and am hoping that my limewire downloading experiences will run a bit smoother from now on.