Halp: Spontaneous Data Throttle and Dropped Incomplete Files (3.1.2)

[PabloTheGreat]

I'm still perusing the stickyed threads for the solution to my first problem, which I've had before and which resolved itself after restarting the router a couple of times; The second problem is all new to me. If no one else has experienced it, I'd be inclined to think it's a hardware issue, but how the hardware would cause that problem is a mystery to me.

1) While torrenting, my speeds will increase normally and then suddenly throttle back to about 10 kbps until I restart uTorrent again. I read somewhere online that this is caused by an NAT overflow in the router, but I didn't see how to fix it.

2) The bigger issue I've had is that whenever I close down uTorrent, it seems to purge all the data in its incomplete files. Using force recheck causes uTorrent to freeze up and, based on the file sizes, there doesn't seem to be anything left of the data in the packets.

EDIT: Also, just found out that whenever I restart uTorrent, the magnet link I rechecked is still rechecking. I can stop it with "stop", but if I try to resume the torrent, uTorrent locks up.

EDIT2: Using the setup guide, uTorrent says that the port I'm using is not open and that I'm still able to download. I tried disabling Windows Firewall and my antivirus (avast!) to see if either was the cause of the port being closed, but both times the test came back positive. Windows Firewall does indeed list uTorrent in its exceptions. I also manually set up port forwarding for the port I'm using, but it still says it's not open. Also, I've found that the slowdown ONLY occurs when I'm selecting specific files to pull from a torrent: When I was downloading the whole thing, it cruised along at a pretty steady 600-700 kbps.

Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT3: Aaaand just like that, the problem resolved itself. Huh. My second monitor in my dual monitor setup also had a weird blue tint issue going on that fixed itself around the same time as well. I guess call this one a hardware problem and move on? Thread closed? :|

EDIT4: Scratch that, the bit with the slowdown is still occurring--it just stopped for ONE of my torrents?

EDIT5: The slowdown only occurs when I first begin a torrent. If I stop it for about a half-hour to an hour and then resume, it putters along just fine. Router overflow I guess?

[PabloTheGreat]

I'm back again, still having the same problem, but I have new information:

--I've experienced the same problem on BitTorrent as well as uTorrent: There will be a speed spike, then a drop down to almost nothing.

--Partial files that were saved to the hard drive are still being dropped in both programs.

--Force recheck in either uTorrent or BitTorrent causes the program to lock up and become unresponsive until I force Windows to shut it down, locked up at a steady 51,380K memory usage.

--I've updated my network drivers just in case that was the problem--no dice.

--I have another computer on the network that has experienced no problems whatsoever in download speeds or any of the symptoms I've experienced, suggesting it isn't a network issue or an issue of the program interacting WITH the network.

--No issues with conventional downloads using other programs, such as Steam, or downloading from the web.

--Number of peers doesn't change from one minute to the next.

--I've tweaked the ports, port forwarding, the bandwidth caps: Nothing.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this? I'm starting to wonder if it's maybe a hardware issue? Either my network card or, more likely, my hard drive going bad?

[PabloTheGreat]

New updates for anyone having a similar problem:

I reinstalled uTorrent and targeted all the data output on an external drive. I also tried running without using PeerBlock at the same time in case that was causing data corruptions: No good in either case.

What DID work was manually increasing the cache size to 1 gig. I initially set it at 500 MBs, and it ran for a much longer period before the slowdown occurred; I then increased it to a gig and it finished the download fine, only now it's stuck indefinitely flushing to disk.

Am currently using ver. 3.1.3 build 27060.

<b>EDIT:</b> Just uninstalled and reinstalled uTorrent, using the 64-bit build from http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=93984 . uTorrent says that it is still vers. 3.1.3 32-bit after the reinstall.

[Firon]

I'd set the cache settings back to default.

Are you skipping files? It may be worth trying out 3.2. It could work better for you.

[PabloTheGreat]

I'd set the cache settings back to default.

Are you skipping files? It may be worth trying out 3.2. It could work better for you.

I was indeed skipping files on some of the torrents: Both ones that I was skipping files on and ones that I wasn't experienced the slowdown, but only the one that I skipped files on crashed on force recheck and/or lost part data.

I went back to 3.0 and 3.1 but experienced the same issues in the past (granted, I didn't notice that the new installs weren't producing new copies of the program). I did install Vuze/Azureus and was able to download everything with no problem but DAMN is that an ugly U.I. I'll try to make sure that there isn't any residual install data from the old version and install again I suppose.