LimeWire and Vista

By zab | February 28, 2007

Windows Vista is out, and the latest version of LimeWire runs fine on it. Read
on to find out what we did to make the transition smooth.

Aero

The first complaint we received from beta testers of the release candidates was
that starting LimeWire would cause the Aero interface to disable its 3D
effects. Relatively quickly, the issue was tracked down to the Java Runtime
Environment, and Sun Microsystems released updates to address that.

Ironically, at the same time Microsoft decided to add a special workaround -
“shim” - that would cause LimeWire to think it was running on Windows XP. The
result was that even with the updated JRE, LimeWire would still disable the
Aero interface at weird points in the GUI.

We had to modify the installer to work around Microsoft’s workaround; and
ironically, yet again Microsoft caught on with us and disabled their shim with
the January 28th update.

Behavior

LimeWire behaves differently on the different versions of windows, and even more
differently on OSX and Unix. Until Service Pack 2 came out, this was mainly
because of Windows 95, 98 and ME as those versions are rather
network-challenged. With Service Pack 2 came the opening socket connection
limit, so LimeWire had to modify its behavior for Windows XP as well. Vista
has the same socket limit.

The code that detects which version of Windows is running didn’t know about
Vista and LimeWire thought it was running on Windows 98. That imposed several
limits on network capability as well as on the GUI. The user experience of
LimeWire on Windows 95/98/ME is significantly less-polished than on XP.
Luckily, updating the code to recognize Vista was trivial.

Bugs

Now comes the least fun part. As much as we were assured that both Vista and
the JREs had been through strenuous testing, we still managed to get weird
errors while running our automated tests. We don’t know whether the bugs were
in Windows or in the JRE, but some of them were particularily serious - one of
the network bugs would eat half of the download sources! We also found some
situations where the Java virtual machine would crash - that is particularly
unpleasant because they are very hard to debug or work around.

Odds & Ends

Seems like we were not the only ones that had to struggle with the transition to
Vista. Several of our users have reported that if they have McAffee firewall
running when they start LimeWire, that will cause the network connection to
dissappear. Not Good! Also, saving files outside of the User’s home directory
seems to behave in a very strange way - something we’re still investigating.

Beautiful

With all of the above said and done, Vista is very pretty, and LimeWire looks
pretty on it too! We recommend that you give it a try with the latest JRE 1.6
to get the highest fidelity :)