yeah, honestly limewire is well known for its viruses and spyware junk/crap. Though i do doubt it put on anything severe enough to prevent it from shutting down, its possible it is hogging system resources so much that that happened.

If you are just looking for songs, try soulseek. ITs much smaller, doesn't have spyware, and you can generally find whatever you want.

http://www.slsknet.org/

if your looking to download other things, I would start going with torrents because they are safer in general (but everything should still be scanned once downloaded)