I was trying to download the latest version of OpenOffice for Mac via bit torrent. It was going to take a few hours so I set it up and everything was going nicely at about 60 - 90kbps so I went to bed. When I woke up this morning, it was stuck at 99.8% no up and no down. So I reset the computer and still nothing. I was using the offical Bit Torrent Client and it came back with:

CONNECTING TO PEERS - in the amount of time left. So I took a shower, ran some errands and came back, still nothing. So I reset the cable modem and router (but surfing wasn't a problem) and iChat connected, etc..

In the lower corner of the client it said connected to 8 peers. But still no up or download.


so I switched clients to Tomato and it just sat there for half an hour trying to connect to the tracker. So I went and found a couple more torrents with a lot of seeders and none of them connected with either of those clients. So I tried Azureus and still, nada.

Thoughts ideas on what's going on?

I have had issues like this before and sometimes it can be solved by stopping the torrent, then doing a force re-check and then starting it again.

Other times the seeded folders have been messed with. Sometimes windows adds those thumbnail files to folders with images and things like that,
but if there are plenty of seeders I don't know if that would be a problem.

Problems with multiple clients may suggest something is wrong elsewhere. Are you sure you're not behind a firewall that blocks torrent traffic? Perhaps your own ISP is blocking it? Have you tried using different ports within all those programs? Are those ports opened on your machine?

You're behind a router with other computers, right? Maybe there's something wrong with Bittorrent's port. It's possible that while you were gone, your computer disconnected from your router and then got a different internal IP when it reconnected. Go to your router's configuration page and check if the port forwarding for torrents is correct.

Or it might be because all of your peers are stuck at 99.8%? Sometimes that happens to old torrents (But since you're trying to download OpenOffice, I doubt that is happening.).

Turns out the hard drive it was saving to was going in and out. It was the original 80GB drive that came with the machine in 2002 and it was suffering some kind of mechanical problems. It would spin up, spin down, then not spin up again. With two other Hard Drives (both 160GB) I rarely used the smaller 80GB drive. Now I'm not having any problems...

Strange what causes stuff sometimes...

Have you tried uTorrent? That's always been the easiest client for me to use. Why not just re-download without torrents? seeing as you have a fast internet connection, it should only take an hour or two.

He's on a Macintosh. He did mention having iChat running...