Windows 8, Integrated LAN Hell (ndis.sys server interrupts)

[MrWig]

I'm running uTorrent 3.2.3 on Windows 8. I just installed win 8 last week, have re-installed several times. I had been running uTorrent 2.2.1 on win 7 for about 2 years, absolutely no issues, steady as a rock. I upgraded because 2.2.1 was having issues on 8, but now 3.2.3 is having the same issues.

I'm not convinced this is as much a uTorrent issue as it is an win 8 lan card driver issue, so I'll give a brief account of what has happened and what I've tried. I am running about 650 torrents on a seedbox/HTPC. I have used the guide to check and double check my configuration, and even went through some of the suggested tweaks to prevent issues. Nothing has worked. With uTorrent running only my seeds I generally don't have an issue, but whenever activity perks up or I download a new torrent as my download speed revs up utorrent pagefaults start flying and after 5-30 minutes the network card conks out and I get System Interrupts hogging 50% of my cpu which renders the entire computer laggy as hell and essentially useless.

I've used latencyMon to try to get to the heart of the issue, anyone who would like to examine the logs from that can do so here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3428343/report.txt

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3428343/Processes.txt

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3428343/Drivers.txt

I have firewall exceptions in place and have checked and double-checked and triple-checked my port-forwarding and router settings. I have a manually set ip correctly configured with the router. To me, the issue seems specifically driver related between win 8 and my integrated lan, and I have tried two versions each of the windows official drivers and manufacturers drivers to no avail. I never had any of these issues in win7.

System Specs: System Specs: ASUS P5G41T-M, Celeron E3400, 4GB Crucial DDR 1066 RAM, XFX Radeon HD 4850 1GB Vid Card, 1TB WD Black SATA, 3TB Seagate Barracuda, utorrent 3.2.3

Any help or advice would be incredibly appreciated...I'm so close to kicking this whole thing out the window.

[MrWig]

For anyone suffering from similar problems in windows 8 with an Atheros integrated ethernet connection, I solved the problem by visiting this site (http://www.atheros.cz/) and installing the Windows 7 x64 drivers. For whatever reason, the Windows 7 drivers are the only ones I can get to work in Windows 8.