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Free music torrent offered by installer cannot be removed.


mtakala

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Conditions needed for bug to show itself:

1) uninstall current utorrent if installed, also delete preferences.

2) download and run the utorrent.exe from www.utorrent.com. You'll see the installer, leave everything as default, including "start utorrent after installing" and "yes, i'd love to check out this free download". NOTE: Tested with 3.1.3 build 27092 dated April 20th, 2012

3) After installer finishes, utorrent starts and the freebie download starts.

4) delete the free download using either the big red X (remove) button from toolbar or right-click -> remove -> remove torrent+data

5) Close utorrent completely

At this point, examining the settings.dat with BEencode Editor, there is this line:

content_offer_url([74]= http://featuredcontent.utorrent.com/DeathGrips-BitTorrent.torrent

The .torrent file has been deleted from %appdata%\utorrent.

6) Restart utorrent. RESULT: THE FREE TORRENT HAS RE-APPEARED IN THE DOWNLOAD LIST and uTorrent has downloaded it again into %appdata%\utorrent.

This is confirmed on XP, Vista and 7. On XP, with user named Administrator and no other users on the system, and the XP was a fresh install with updates on a virtual machine.

The end result is that casual non-nerd user is unable to get rid of the freebie torrent, its a forced download. The installer didn't warn that user cannot remove the download if it is selected. Solution is to delete the above line from settings.dat OR uninstall with delete preferences and reinstall without the "free download". This cannot be the desired user experience in any form!

Deleting the above line between steps 5 and 6 will result in correct behavior and the download does not reappear anymore. Perhaps the line should be deleted right after utorrent first starts to download it...

NOTE: I see that I should use the latest beta before reporting anything, but the beta does not have the free download NOR the toolbar, which I believe are to be added right before releasing as stable.

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