Corrupted uTorrent? Slow Speeds.

[silverdroid]

I have been going crazy with this problem and ended up switching to another client.  If I could restore uTorrent, it would save me a lot of local data validation time for seeding:

 

All of a sudden, my downloads were going from 1.5 MB/s to 8 KB/s after 30 seconds or so.  I am downloading to an external hard drive and people claim that they are not meant for Torrents, however I have been successful at download torrents that range from 8 GB to 300 GB over the last 2 years.  With a new Torrent client, I'm back to downloading at 1.5 MB/s on an external hard drive (200 GB torrent).  When the download problem started, I even tried stopping all seeding and just have one active torrent; same download problem.  

 

I was running the latest version for OSX and on top of the speed problem, the lists of downloads would no longer appear on the screen.  I'd have to select the list window from the File Menu manually; the window itself would pop up, but no torrents would be in the list.  I un-installed and reverted back to the second latest version of uTorrent; all my Torrents came back, fully visible on the screen, but the speed problem continued.  As of now uTorrent won't even open anymore.

 

Recommendations?  And ideally to preserve my list of existing torrents?  Else, I'd have to manually re-execute each torrent and validate local data (which takes hours for some torrents before they can start to seed).  Would appreciate any help.   Thanks!