Red icon, but still downloading?

[umiman]

Hi,

I've been using utorrent for several months now and it was working great with speeds at 125kbps on average. However, just recently the icon suddenly switched to red and my speeds plummeted till the 0.3 - 1kbps area. Now, the speeds have gone into the 20-70kbps range with extreme alternation between the two values (but the icon is still red).

However, it seems my upload speeds are at a constant 60kbps.

Also, I can only download one torrent at a time now, as anything else won't return any seeders. If it's noteworthy, the speed at which utorrent connects to trackers has slowed down as well. It used to be that I could start downloads at 50kbps. Now it starts at 0.1. Furthermore, I've tried to download the torrents with other clients (Bitlord, bitcomet, azureus) and it's the same problem.

What's going on?

p.s: I've opened all ports on my router, including utorrent specific ones, disabled all firewalls, and done everything in that list of things to do. My roommates' torrents are going fine with no port problems too.

[Switeck]

Sounds like your computer's networking software has been corrupted or co-opted by a virus/spyware. Or just plain DLL damage.

Have you scanned for viruses and spyware lately?

(Especially using something like Process Explorer or HijackThis.)

Can you restore your settings using a system restore point?

Make sure that your roommate and you aren't trying to use more bandwidth at the same time than your connection provides. If your roommate's upload speed is set too high, then yours might not experience low download speeds despite nothing being wrong.