A unique issue

[KrossRoads]

Let me give you some specs before I start.

UTorrent version: 2.2.1

OS: Windows XP SP2

ISP: Comcast

Connection Type: Cable

More details available upon request.

Now that that's out of the way, sit back, this is going to be a good one.

About a month ago, I noticed my usually quick internet was slowed down to a crawl. I thought it could be any number of things, and spent the next week going insane looking over everything that could have gone wrong. It just seemed as if my bandwidth was next to non-existent. Browsing the internet using Firefox was slow (With me having to reload pages constantly because loading even a single picture could take a while), updates to my anti-virus program was crawling, etc. So I figured "Why not?" and tried to download a torrent with uTorrent. It worked perfectly.

So now I raised an eyebrow, no other program, but uTorrent, was able to do basically anything involving the internet. This has never happened before, everything was perfectly fine. Then I noticed something else, whenever a torrent was actively downloading, my browsing speed with Firefox rocketed back up to where it usually is. So I tried to update AVG, and it did. My bandwidth was back, baby!

....Until the torrent finished downloading, then it flopped once again. So I tried a few tests. As long as a torrent is actively downloading, I can access the internet at the same speed as the download rate. If I set the download rate for the torrent at 200 kb/s, that's how fast my AVG will update. If I limit the download to 50 kb/s, that's the rate Youtube videos load in Firefox. If I pause the torrent, don't have a torrent, or shut down uTorrent, it goes back down to almost nothing once again.

So my first instinct was to fiddle with the configuration setting of uTorrent, but nothing there seemed to help. So, I uninstalled uTorrent and restarted my computer. No change, internet was barely there. I installed uTorrent again, started downloading a torrent, and the internet was quick once again. I searched the forums here, got nothing close to what I was experiencing, and decided to make a topic.

So, other than the obvious solution of "Every time I want to use the internet, I just download from uTorrent at the same time", I was wondering if someone could give me some help untangling uTorrent from deciding -all- my program's access to the world wide web. If you need additional information on something, just ask. If you can't help, I hope my issue gave you a chuckle!

[KrossRoads]

Update!

As it turns out, the problem is gone now. Not quite sure if I actually -did- anything, though. Everything I tried did nothing to help, so I was just downloading torrents and waiting for a reply here so I could surf the web with any speed. When I booted up this morning, everything seemed to be working as usual. I'm a little afraid to boot up uTorrent in the event the issue comes out all over again. I wouldn't be so uneasy if I knew what caused or even fixed the problem, but for now I'd rather rely on another torrent engine. Sorry for wasting your time everyone, and I apologize to anyone reading this thinking that I found a solution. I did not.... It just kinda fixed itself. Somehow.