A few questions

[nicknefarious]

Hi all, I have a few questions and am hoping someone has the time to help me out here. I am running Vista Ultimate, uTorrent 1.7.7 and connect through a Motorola Cable Modem and a TP-Link WR541G wireless router and am also running Zone Alarm's latest Internet Security Suite as AV and Firewall.

Firstly I have tried everything to get the connection to turn green but it remains yellow. My torrents are still reasonably quick, but would really like full speed. I have forwarded the ports in the router as suggested at www.portforward.com and entered exceptions and expert rules in the firewall in Zone Alarm, I'm not sure what else to do. When I check the ports using portforward's tool it says the port is closed. Any suggestions or ideas?

Secondly my UTorrent quite often either freezes, slows the rest of the PC down to a virtual standstill and when I try to kill the process in task manager I cannot. Even when I shut the computer down it takes an eternity to shut down because of this. This problem doesn't occur if I haven't been running UTorrent - but it did also occur when I tried using FlashGet for torrents. When I investigate a little further I usually find the UTorrent process is chewing up a lot of memory... far more than usual.

Thirdly every time I start UTorrent it checks all the files already downloaded. This takes forever and is unneccessary. How do I stop this from happening?

A few torrents I am downloading at the moment also seem to be returning a large number of Hash Fails. When I say large number, I am used to none where I am now getting a couple of hash fails an hour.

I look forward to, and really appreciate any help or feedback anyone can give.

Cheers,

Nick

[jewelisheaven]

Freezing likely due to http://utorrent.com/faq.php#Incompatible_software

Follow http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=15992 for internet problems and forwarding pages are usually found @ http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm

Start by uninstalling ZA.. when it breaks things, it breaks them bad. If your problems go away, switch to another firewall...

You don't really even need a firewall as you're behind a router and that's magnitudes better than a software firewall.

Hashfails may be bad hardware or a bad swarm. Are all the peers in the same subnet?

[nicknefarious]

The memory problem and also now the crashing of Zone Alarm's True Vector Service seems to occur when I connect to a faster torrent... Almost immediately I start getting hashfails in the loggger, ZA shuts down and the PC starts going a little wonky. Any specific suggestions as to how I can remedy this problem... I had a similar problem while downloading torrents with Flashget, albeit it much worse with Flashget, so I am assuming it is more a Vista-oriented problem? Or Zone Alarm? Or I has read somewhere that the router may have problems with too many connections. Which is more likely to cause my specific symptoms?

Thanks again for your feedback and help,

Nick

[jewelisheaven]

Get rid of ZA to start.. like I said before

[Firon]

Zone Alarm is a horrible firewall. Switch to something else. Uninstall it and replace it with Comodo or something.

[nicknefarious]

Many thanks. I uninstalled ZA and after further review installed Comodo. All problems resolved. I installed Kaspersky AV to go along with it and everything is playing along together nicely. I still can't get the connections icon to go green though. Even though my speed seems to be good. Thanks again, Nick

[Firon]

Did you try the port tester?

Also, there's instructions on configuring Comodo properly here. http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=292343#p292343