Utorrent 1.6.1 or 1.7 crashes often under my Vista

[questionmark]

- SOLUTION -

I have finally solved this problem. As a side note to all VISTA users, never install Norman Virus Control as it contains a particular .dll file that constantly causes application crashes, including uTorrent. Ironically, I came upon this warning message when I had given up on uTorrent and installed Azureus which detected this .dll file; after uninstalling Norman Virus Control and returning to my favourite uTorrent client, it worked fine without any more crashes!!

Hope that helps! Close this topic please, thanks. Remember, Norman Virus Control is not compatible with uTorrent under Windows Vista ~

- END -

Greetings, all.

This is a very annoying problem that never happened under my previous Win XP, but which is now happening VERY often in Win Vista: Utorrent 1.6.1 or 1.7 keeps crashing WITHOUT being able to write crash dumps when the error message "Utorrent has stopped working.." pops up every time. Initially, the first few crashes DID manage to write crash dumps but they were nowhere to be found in the installation directory. Since then, it has simply been crashing after approx. every 10 mins or so, or even less, WITHOUT showing the 'write crash dump' message. Let's go over the specifications:

Windows Vista Business

Processor: Intel® Core2 CPU T5600 @ 1.83GHz [Laptop]

Memory (RAM): 2038 MB

System type: 32-bit Operating System

Currently behind Windows Firewall (exception given to Utorrent) and Norman Virus Control

In my opinion, I strongly believe those crashes have nothing to do with firewalls or internet problems (router, download, port etc..). They may be due more to the disk cache (no. of reads/writes to the disk), or anything related to that problem.

My Utorrent disk cache is set to Auto Cache Size on default, and whatever else. I have been reading thru all the forums a lot, and it seems there are almost no people with this same problem. I cannot find any explanation for this, and I am sorry I have no crash dumps to send you as they were never written in the first place everytime a crash takes place..... =(

I am not sure if it is just me, but whenever the global download rate reaches an average of 100kb/s, the crashe(s) may occur, but they also happen at lower speeds of 70kb/s or something. Or maybe they do not have anything to do with download speeds at all, but instead the conflict between the disk cache and reads/writes (slow disk perhaps, data transfer, etc...)... Totally clueless here on how to solve this.

Appreciate your help on this headache!

EDIT: I experimented with different values of the Utorrent disk cache, ranging from lower than 1 GB to even higher than 2 GB. They all end up with a crash as per usual, after an average of 5-10 mins. *Shrugs*

[Firon]

I believe there's an unsolved crash bug where caches larger than 1023MB cause a crash. I know the Norman firewall can cause problems, but I don't remember the AV doing the same.

[questionmark]

Reporting a new finding:

My uTorrent under Vista seems able to maintain a no-crash state for the longest time yet, 15 mins or more or sometimes full-time, if it manages a global download rate of an average of 50kb/s - 70kb/s, but not exceeding 80kb/s - 100kb/s. Hmm, but what would the download rate have to do with crashes in this case, I wonder...?

[Ultima]

Indeed, Norman products have been known to cause problems with µTorrent :/