Constant hanging caused by latent firewall settings?

[tidus_lonewolf]

I've had this problem for a while, and I've finally gathered up the resolve to finally figure out what's wrong.

When I start up uTorrent with a torrent active in it, the program hangs. No, there isn't any unusual CPU usage, it just hangs, as if it's waiting for something. If there aren't any torrents active, uTorrent will start up and function normally until a torrent is started, when it will start to hang similarly.

I say "hang" because it doesn't quite freeze. The program is still running, and isn't considered "Not Responding" by XP, but if I try and alt-tab into it, about half of it will paint about half the time. If I wait about 5 minutes, eventually the whole thing will paint properly, and any clicks will take ~1 minute to process. The torrents do make progress however.

Previously, I've used PeerGuardian and ZoneAlarm, but both are completely uninstalled and have been for the past few weeks. HijackThis and Process Explorer both confirm that no vestiges of either are still running.

I know for a fact that my ports are not forwarded correctly, but I don't really see how that could directly cause this.

As for hardware,

I'm going through an Apple AirportExtreme router (I don't have access to it for the moment, but I'll soon enough) to my Windows XP SP 2 machine. I've got an AMD Athlon 64 Processor, and a NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT video card.

I've tried to include all the information I could think of, but remind me if I've forgotten anything. I'll be watching this topic, and also on the IRC under the same name. Sorry if this is confusing at all.

-tidus_lonewolf.

[Firon]

Well, can you post a hijackthis log?

Also, check the "Threads" tab of process explorer for the utorrent process and paste a screenshot or something.