Very strange issue, uTorrent is killing my internet on ONE laptop only

[jwhittington]

First off, I'm not your typical noobie user needing help with my l33t speeds. I work in a NOC at an ISP so I at least partially know my way around network traffic and such. I have a VERY strange issue. uTorrent works fine on 3 of my computers and one of my two laptops, however, on the 2nd laptop, the one I recently installed Windows 7 on I'm having a very strange problem. Somehow uTorrent is killing my entire internet connectivity every minute or so. This ONLY happens when uTorrent is open on this particular laptop, but when it is, at least once every 60 seconds, my entire network goes down and uTorrent speeds drop to 0.

I have verified that my entire network goes down by running a continuous ping from 2 different computers, including the laptop that I'm having problems with. The pings run continuously until uTorrent is open, but once a minute while it's open the pings die also on BOTH machines.

The weird part is this is only a temporary thing, the connection always comes back, it seems to go out for about 20 seconds at a time. I've tried disabling firewalls and such but I'm stumped beyond that. I don't understand how uTorrent could shut my whole connection down when it's not using any traffic at all.

Here is a picture of what I'm talking about, you can see the pings dying in the background also. I'd really like some help here as I am clueless what to even try, as I have no idea what would be causing this. uTorrent with the same exact settings on every other machine in the house works fine.

[jwhittington]

The forum seems to be cutting off the pic, but here it is.

http://i54.tinypic.com/qxo1ex.jpg

[jwhittington]

Disabling uTP seems to have fixed it. Any ideas how it could throttle my entire network like that?

[Switeck]

Sounds like an overload of some kind, but I currently know very little about your uTorrent settings, your line's max sustainable DL/UL speeds, or modem/router/wireless? networking setup.

[jwhittington]

I don't think it was related to any kind of overload, as on every other machine with the exact same settings I never had this issue. I have 20MB down and 1.5MB up. My internet traffic was killed to the point a very small ping packet couldn't leave my network, so I really don't think it has to do with an overload. I guess it doesn't much matter anymore as I fixed it by disabling uTP but I'd like an opinion from someone who is familiar with that protocol just for my morbid curiousity.

[rob444]

Wireless or wired?

It sounds to me you have too many connections coming in/out, Windows usually responds this way then.

I have Windows 7 x64 and I had similar problems as you but it turned out it wasn't really related to utorrent (though utorrent triggered the problem more frequently than any other application I had running), which basically killed my connection now and then, so severe, that I had to disable and enable my LAN adapter to get a working connection again.

I don't know if you are having the same issue but if you do, it's a driver issue... I used realtek's latest drivers and they were basically a pile of poop so I had to uninstall them and click the box that will make Windows remove the drivers permanently and then use the old ones that comes with Windows 7.

And it was a bit unclear from your first post, but does your internet connection die or is it only the connection for the laptop that dies? If it's the whole shebang you should look into your router.

utp: http://user.utorrent.com/documentation/utp

[Switeck]

"My internet traffic was killed to the point a very small ping packet couldn't leave my network, so I really don't think it has to do with an overload."

Is EXACTLY how an overload would work! The router's cpu can be bogging down trying to inspect-and-classify every UDP packet. There may be plenty of bandwidth left (in theory) when the cpu overloads because the cpu could have a bug in its UDP handling or just be dog-slow.

If it's just the laptop's internet connection that goes out...then it's probably the laptop's software firewall or networking drivers for its NIC that are horribly bad.