uTorrent hoses my network (not internet) connection?

[captaintrav]

1) router is a LinkSys WRT54g, running 'tomato' linux firmware, QoS capable and enabled. This problem pre-dates the router anyway..

2) Port is forwarded to the PC properly, incoming connections work fine according to the little green checkmark and the utorrent port tester

3) DHT, peer exchange, UPnP all turned off in the client, max connections 130, per torrent 70

4) Windows XP SP3

5) PC behaves fine with other torrent clients -> occasionally I've ran Azureus and another torrent client on my Linux box simultaneously with acceptable performance

6) Internet connection is 5mbps/640kbps DSL, even with upload capped at 10kb/sec, webbrowsing almost impossible; according to router QoS I'm only using ~90kbit/sec of outgoing bandwidth, should be well under the limits.

7) It's not the internet connection _at all_ that gets hosed (it's fast on the other PCs at home), it's the network connection of the computer, browsing to file shares elsewhere on my home network becomes unbearably slow as well.

8) not running 3rd party software firewall, windows firewall is turned off.

At this point, I'm suspecting the NIC (wireless card) in the computer as having some sort of issue that causes uTorrent to have fits. I've had this problem before (went back to Azureus), now tried uT again, same thing even with a different motherboard, processor, and a fresh install of XP. Wireless card is a D-Link DWL-G510 Rev. B, which I believe uses an Atheros chipset. Anyone ever hear of a similar issue? Only real other possibility I can think of is some other conflicting software, but like I mentioned, I've been chasing this problem for some time. I'm not looking to flamed, or to get generic advice - I'm pretty capable of configuring torrent clients since the protocol was invented, but this has me puzzled...

Oh, and I'll add, within 20 seconds or so of closing uTorrent, the network connection perks right up again, I'm using a patched tcpip.sys, and have nothing in the event log of note either.

[Switeck]

Re-enable peer exchange...that's extremely unlikely to be causing the problem because that reuses existing peer/seed connections instead of making new ones like uTorrent's other features do.

Disable Resolve IPs.

Reduce Global and per-torrent connections to 50.

Reduce uTorrent's half open limit to only 4.

Then if uTorrent doesn't hose the network connection for that computer...we can pretty much conclude your networking software or hardware on that computer is just really bad. (Anything from lousy firewall to bad drivers to bad commercial software or viruses.)

[captaintrav]

I switched from 1.7.7 to the latest beta, and things seem to have improved. I left the max half-open at 8, but I did lower the global max to 75 from 130 and max per torrent to 40 from 70 as well. Even with upload speed set to 20kb/sec it is much better than it was at 10kb/sec before.