uTorrent reading MASSIVE amounts of data from disk

[3ipfA8Re]

Here's how it happens:

1. I switch on my computer in the morning.

2. I start up uTorrent (and sometimes SysInternals FileMon to diagnose this problem)

3. Everything works fine for some time (something like an hour typically): uTorrent is seeding and performing mostly 16896 byte (16K + 512 bytes - weird but manageable) and a few 16384 (16K) byte reads. This adds up to a manageable read rate of a few MBytes/minute

4. Suddenly for no apparent reason uTorrent switches over to mostly 4194816 byte (4M + 512 bytes) and a few 4194304 (4M) byte reads. This adds up to an entirely unreasonable read rate of many tens of MBytes/second - and very many of the reads are at the same offset, that is it's the same 4 MByte blocks being read repeatedly

I noticed this behavior after upgrading to the version 3.0 release candidates, I think I'd have noticed it if it had been going on for a long time.

The 197 torrents I'm seeding all have the data files but not the .torrent files stored on a network drive, accessed via a mapped drive letter, not via the "\\Server\Share" method.

Setup:

AMD X2, 2 GB RAM, Windows XP Pro x86 SP3

Utorrent 3.0 (build 25345)

Could this be caused by messing around with the advanced settings? Will deleting "settings.dat" wipe all uTorrent settings without clearing the torrent list?