I have questions about how they work. I've had this issue in both Bitcoin and Litecoin Qt clients.
I joined a p2p pool that dumped my shares directly to my wallet. I don't have a lot of horsepower, so after a few hours I had 50 transactions totaling about 1LTC. I wanted to send them to BTC-e to add to my funds there. I select it all, set the tx fee to 0.01, and hit go. It comes back and tells me I don't have enough funds because of the 0.8 LTC tx fee. I lower my optional tx fee, until i've eventually removed it entirely. It's still demanding 80% of my transaction just to send it.
What part of the system am I missing? Is there a baseline tx fee? Doesn't this make p2p kinda worthless for LTC, since it doesn't aggregate your earnings before sending them?
Litecoin fees can be kinda steep. I patched mine to allow transactions with lower fees (all the way down to zero, if you want). In your Litecoin source-code tree, load src/main.h and search for this line:
static const int64 MIN_TX_FEE = 10000000;
Change the minimum to zero and recompile. Use the settxfee API call (or the appropriate options in the Qt client) to set the fee you want to use. If you're using Gentoo, you can use my litecoind and/or litecoin-qt ebuilds (part of my
overlay); include the nofee USE flag to apply the patch.
Warning: Transactions may take longer to confirm if you do this. I've had some take a day or so to get through.