Quote Originally Posted by stevesr0
The 10th time I attempted to use Bittorrent, I chose "open" rather than save to disk and the client opened immediately and started downloading (I don't see this mentioned in the FAQ and it doesn't seem obvious except in hindsight<g>). While the download speed wasn't as high as many others have reported (~20-25 k/sec), it kept chugging along overnight and in the morning was complete, and looks to be the correct size (I haven't yet checked the MD5 sum).
Glad you got BitTorrent working, more or less. Do you have a hardware firewall (DSL/Cable router)? Are you running a software firewall (even that awful thing that comes in XP)? If you have either a software or hardware firewall (or, as in my case, both), the firewall can block incoming connections. The basic idea of BitTorrent is that many people have a copy of the file and upload as well as download (even before your get it all you can be making the parts that you do have available to others). If you have firewalls in place then others cannot get the file from you. Obviously if everyone did this the system would not work. So the proper thing is to forward the ports in your router and also in your software firewall so that incoming requests can get to BitTorrent. In an effort to encourage this, BitTorrent is designed to still let you download a file if you are not sharing, but it will run much slower than if you share what you have. Although maybe things were just slow when you downloaded your file, it sounds like maybe you were "leeching" and so BitTorrent slowed down by design.