Utorrent crashes, one torrent specifically, during checking

[lardbeetle]

Hi all, I'm running utorrent 1.8, and used to be running 1.75. My machine is a Windows PC running XP SP2 and has an athlon 64 x2, 2 gigs of ram, and three hard drives.

I'm not running nvidia firewall (my motherboard is a ULI), nor any of the other malware programs listed in the FAQ. I recently scanned my computer using AVG free edition antivirus and spyware, and did not find anything.

On to the problem.

One of my torrents seems to be unstable. When checking the torrent after a bad restart, it crashes my computer. When that specific torrent starts to check, my computer starts getting choppy (the mouse lags a bit). This does not happen with any other torrent. When the system crashes, no error message is displayed. Three times, it has given me a Machine Check Exception bluescreen. It is a torrent for a 46 gigabyte download, and is 37% done, so you can imagine why I would be hesitant to simply trash the thing and start over.

Is there anything I can do to fix this? The files contained within are video files, and errors are acceptable, so could I possibly skip the checking process?

[Firon]

Machine Check Exception is a hardware problem. Possibly a result of overclocking (and if not, faulty hardware).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Check_Exception

[lardbeetle]

I agree, that is what it says. However, it should not be a hardware problem, as it only occurs when a specific program (utorrent) is accessing a particular set of data (the one specific set of torrent files) in a specific way (error checking).

Utorrent is running happily right now on my other torrents.

It is also possible that the MCE's were unrelated. Most of the time, my computer simply freezes, no error codes.

I would also like to add that this problem does not seem to be related to overclocking. My processor is running at default voltage and speed, as well as my memory. Core temps are low (35 C under load). I even tried underclocking my memory and running it at DDR333 speeds insead of DDR400.

The problem is isolated to utorrent and has never happened while utorrent has not been running. It also wasn't fixed by a reinstall.

[Switeck]

Have you done disk tests on the hard drive containing the faulty torrent file?

It may be more than the torrent that's bad.

[lardbeetle]

I recently did a full chkdisk of my entire system, including that hard drive. I've not had any problems accessing the files that have finished downloading or anything else on the drive.

HD Tune comes up with a clean bill of health for the disc.

[Firon]

SMART checks are worthless, truth be told. SpinRite works somewhat better.

But seriously, you almost certainly do have a hardware problem (or possibly driver). Faulty RAM, faulty CPU, faulty motherboard...

[Lord Alderaan]

Just for reference a few years back I had a persistent S.M.A.R.T failure on startup. Nothing seemed wrong with the disk at all though but to be sure I made a backup of everything on that disk. A few days later the disk suddenly was unreadable. So I'm appreciative of S.M.A.R.T. even though I have no idea how it works.

[ajones81]

If possible you can try moving the downloaded files to a different hard disk, pointing the torrent to it and re-checking.

[Ruben666]

I have the same problem... But when i removed utorrent my bluescreen disapperd..

I started utorrent and it run a 63 gb file.. and during that time the mouse frose and the bluescreen come.. Machine_check_excepition...

Something is wrong with Utorrent 1,7,7..

[DreadWingKnight]

Bluescreens don't indicate problems with uT.

Bluescreens are kernel-level issues.

uT is a user-level application.

Claiming something is wrong with uT is ignoring that fact.