Why is uTorrent connecting to itself on localhost?

I am getting this message:

[2011-02-01 09:47:00]  Incoming connection from 127.0.0.1:20000
[2011-02-01 09:47:00]  Banning peer: same peer id as existing peer

I had asked 2 questions in an earlier thread, but I figured one question per thread, so some info from the earlier thread can be found here: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=561800#p561800

So I found out why an IP that supposedly wasn't on my network was connected to me, and the answer to that was that the IP address was assigned to another network adapter on my machine: specifically, the Virtualbox Host-Only adapter. So, I set that to DHCP, and then disabled it, and now all of the odd requests are coming on on 127.0.0.1:20000.

I also enabled outgoign logging and look what I found:

[2011-02-01 09:54:09]  127.0.0.1:20000 [uTP](<torrentName.here>): Connecting: source: L

So wtf? Why is uTorrent connecting to itself on localhost?

I wonder if this also may be part of my slow torrents problem; I have about 12,500 torrents, which are all about 1/4 to 1 Mb of data each, and they are coming in extremely slow. maybe 100 per day at most. I have port 20,000 forwarded, but still quite slow, and getting these odd errors which appear to be uTorrent connecting to itself.

Anybody know any fixes?

Devs? Am I missing something obvious? This is rather annoying, and I can't seem to make it stop.

I'm not a dev, but are you sure your HOSTS file isn't redirecting an external IP to localhost or a loopback IP?

(%windir%\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS - with no extension)

And you've never run a proxy server on that machine, right?

You can watch what ports are in use with more detail using Mark Russinovich's TCPview.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals

It can be downloaded and installed standalone (see the Top 10 Downloads menu on the left side of that page), or it's also part of the Sysinternals Suite.

I usually uncheck the Show Unconnected Endpoints option, but that is handy for watching transient connections, because with that checked they'll stay in the list even after the remote disconnects, until the local socket times out. Plus that option shows the 'Listening' sockets statically.

uT connects to itself for various reasons. Just forget about it.

Darr247: Thanks for the tips. My HOSTS file is clean, only one custom entry that doesn't affect this. Sorry TCPView i don't really know how to use or what to make of the information, but it is very interesting the stuff that it shows.

Firon: OK sure, in that case is it possible to stop it from showing up as a problem in my logs?