I checked mine and it was mostly RSS feeds and recent added torrents, I believe. Line after line repeating, like: Feed 1 Feed 2 Feed 3 Feed 1 Feed 2 Feed 3 Tried to remove all with a hex editor but it became corrupted when trying to load it. My settings.dat was about 150 MB before and 20 kB after edit. BEncoder might've worked to remove all dupes, but waited for about 10 minutes for it to load the original file. I took an older backed up settings.dat I had and changed my stats with BEncoder instead. As someone said, the current settings.dat may be hosed forever.