uTorrent crashes when removing torrent

[fink23]

I usually have about 50-100 torrents in my uTorrent at any time. Most of them are usually dormant, but from time to time I activate most of them. Only problem is - when that many torrents are in the client at the same time, trying to remove one causes it to freeze. The torrent is removed when I restart uTorrent, but if I was downloading large files before it crashed it'll have to check them all over again. At 90% of 5GB that takes a serious amount of time, and it crowds system resources while doing so. I am considering migrating to another client, but I'd really like to keep uTorrent. I like the interface and the way it lets you configure just about anything. I run Norman AV, but I didn't find anything specific to it that resembled my problem in the FAQ. I also run Win2k3, but I had the same problem while running uTorrent on XP.

When I have <10 torrents in the client this problem does not arise. On top of it all - last time it restarted - at 90% through a huge file, it just restarted - this time with an error message and an option to send a report. Which meant a new eternity for checking that very same file (as well as all of the others that were downloading) This is getting to be a drag that outweighs the pros of this client. Any suggestions as to what makes this happen would make me thankful.

The client is running mostly from two USB2.0-drives if that's got anything to do with this. The system is an old P4 2.0GHz (Northwood) running on an ABIT BD7II motherboard. 1GB of DDR RAM, 2x80GB internal drives, 2X250GB external drives (LaCie), GF6200 (if that matters at all). Well, all the info should be here.

I use Windows Firewall (the one included in SP2 for XP and out of the box for W2k3). No hardware firewalls are involved apart from some filtering at my ISP (a few closed ports for security but no active firewalling). Connection is VPN-tunnel via LAN.

(Edit)

I forgot to mention that I am running uTorrent 1.6, and that it runs just fine when I'm not trying to remove torrents. It also reacts from time to time when stopping torrents, but mainly it's removing them that'll cause it to hang indefinitely. While hanging it gobbles up 40-60% CPU.

[Ultima]

Norman's softwares have been known to cause crashes with µTorrent. Yes, not just the firewall as listed in the FAQ, but the antivirus as well. If you search for the word norman in the forums, you'll see practically nothing but threads relating to µTorrent crashes. Surprise surprise?

Maybe you might be lucky, and it's not Norman causing the crash, but at this point, we don't know until you try uninstalling it.

[fink23]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I removed Norman to check what'd happen. I also at first noticed that when killing off each and every Norman process visible in the task bar, the system came to a halt in a way that much resembles the few other halts I've had since installing Norman. I've usually blamed the driver version for my nVidia card for this, because one of the main symptoms of this kind of halt is that layers on the screen stop behaving as they should. One app will be "stuck" at the bottom of the screen, even if the process is long gone, and ordering of other layers also would get affected. At the end usually explorer.exe would stop responding and reboot would be the only way out. Because of the layering issue, I figured it might just have something to do with the way the forceware (nVidia driver) handled my multiple desktops. Plus, I've had similar problems directly after changing display modes, so that helped link those two together. Seems I might have been wrong about making that link. If killing the NVC-related processes produce the same results - AND other problems, it might seem like NVC was the root of all evil.

Everything seems a lot more snappy now, and uTorrent is at the moment running fine. It remains to be seen wether or not the problem was actually cured by this, as it was pretty random before - but with the same cause whenever it happened(removing torrents in crowded client).

For now, at least everything looks a-ok. So, thanks a lot. I'll throw in a new post if the beast rears its ugly head again

(edit)

By the way. I was starting to think that my USB-drives might have something to do with it all. This computer is probably at the end of its lifespan, but I prefer it to my others because it's pretty much soundproofed and resides in my bedroom - it's on 25/7. I'm connected via 100mbit, so the datarate from some torrents will easily exceed 6-7MB/s (capital letters intended that way ). When a torrent starts going that fast I'd usually get the Disk Overload-message, and then everything stops until the percentage lowers below 100% again. I figured as this is an old computer, and I've already got some stability issues related to USB and a couple of PCI devices, that these problems might just be due to instability of an ageing motherboard or somewhat slow external drives(The stability issues seem to be a mix of IRQ-"semi conflicts" (no clearly stated problems in device manager, but devices known not to be too happy with sharing IRQ) and PCI latency).

These problems with drive overload also seem to have disappeared after I removed Norman. Might it be the double reading of every other bit and bob on the drive that caused it? I know Norman has a feature called Sandbox, where it emulates a separate neutered computer to check what different pieces of suspicious code will try to do. Could this be generating the extra workload nessecary to overload my drives?

[Ultima]

Dunno, but I do know Norman's been causing problems regardless of connection type for people, and I (somehow) doubt that everyone who's reported the problems have had similar setups to yours, so extra load or not, Norman is problematic. Best that it remain removed (in case you were planning on reinstalling to play around). Of course, you're free to do that, but I wouldn't expect much.