All torrents becomming corrupted?

[llama]

For some reason I am unable to open torrent files. They've been downloading extremely slow, and then when I try to open them I get this message:



It's the same message each time, only it has the name of the file changed to whatever I'm trying to open, obviously.

Does anyone know what causes this or how to fix it? It wasn't doing this until after I came to university, so is it possible that the university has some kind of block on it? I've had trouble with all my media players since coming here, too. They usually freeze my computer, if I can get them to open at all.

[NoSanninWa]

Have you tried to start torrents by downloading the torrent file and then starting download from explorer?

[Sazelyt]

Don't know whether this helps, but found a similar example to your case. Here is one of the posts discussing a similar problem.

"I have found the cause. Both of my systems interpret the torrent files as IBM EMMS files, which means the files are encrypted upon download. It took me a while to notice this because they are (apparently) correctly recognised as torrent files, but with a bit of tweaking it became obvious that they are being EMMS encrypted first.

Hence the 'invalid torrent file'.

As best I can tell, this is happening because at some point I installed Realplayer on my system. At least that is the only software I could tell that installed the EMMS encryption system. Apparently, even though all Real software has been removed, EMMS encryption hasn't. Argh!"

Anyway, just search for the error you get using google, you can find some more posts related to that (more than you expect anyways). Maybe one of them might help.

But, as the quoted post above suggests, it might be related to some program or update you have installed just recently, try to remove that program/update to see whether it helps. Good luck!

[Ledgem]

Originally Posted by llama

I've had trouble with all my media players since coming here, too. They usually freeze my computer, if I can get them to open at all.

This one may be a separate issue. Do you have any security software on your computer? In a large network setting, such as at a university, it's critical. An infected machine on the network can infect unprotected machines - it's not so different as on your home network, except that now there are a lot more people, and many of them are bound to be clueless and/or performing risky activities with their computer. My university has designed their network to shut off computers performing virus-like activities (scanning the internal network), but infections can still spread.

The fact that you're having issues with your players after you arrived at the university could mean that you've been infected. Or, it could just coincide with an update or system modification you performed around the same time, as Sazelyt mentioned.

What media players are you using? What media players can you run? Is it only video players that you can't run, or is it music players as well?

[llama]

Originally Posted by NoSanninWa

Have you tried to start torrents by downloading the torrent file and then starting download from explorer?

I did try that, many times. It didn't work before, but now it seems to be. Maybe it just likes you better and was waiting for your suggestion. :P Although now it's going amazingly slow, but that's probably just because I'm on such a big network.

Originally Posted by Ledgem

The fact that you're having issues with your players after you arrived at the university could mean that you've been infected. Or, it could just coincide with an update or system modification you performed around the same time, as Sazelyt mentioned.

What media players are you using? What media players can you run? Is it only video players that you can't run, or is it music players as well?

The university requires that some kind of antivirus software is installed, as well as the most current Microsoft updates. It won't even let you connect to the internet without them. I did wonder if was infected with something, but I did all the spyware and antivirus scans and nothing came up, as well as doing a disk check and defragment. Still no luck. I wondered if it was one of the Microsoft updates that caused it (my computer didn't seem to like the new explorer) but I don't know if I can uninstall them or not.

The media players I usually use are Windows Media Player and Musicmatch Jukebox. I can't get Musicmatch to run AT ALL, and sadly the software is back home so I can't reinstall it at the moment. Windows Media Player will run if I'm lucky. If I try to open a song directly through it, it will usually play the one song and then freeze. If I open the player first and then put songs on it, sometimes it works, sometimes it freezes. And it doesn't like to play CDs at all.

It's a huge pain...

[Sazelyt]

Originally Posted by llama

The university requires that some kind of antivirus software is installed, as well as the most current Microsoft updates. It won't even let you connect to the internet without them. I did wonder if was infected with something, but I did all the spyware and antivirus scans and nothing came up, as well as doing a disk check and defragment. Still no luck. I wondered if it was one of the Microsoft updates that caused it (my computer didn't seem to like the new explorer) but I don't know if I can uninstall them or not.

You can go back to a restoration point before those recent updates/intallation, and check the source of the problem (hardware or software).

You can also try to uninstall the updates one by one, to check whether they cause some compatibility problems (add/remove programs can also be used to uninstall windows components, such as windows updates).

Since you are at a college, you can easily find someone who is more than capable of sorting such problems in a short time (i.e., you can trick your college's computing systems department or your department's systems-help desk into saying that installing those programs and updates crashed my computer, they may try to help).

[llama]

It's all better now! I uninstalled all the Microsoft updates and my computer is happy again. Thanks to everyone who helped!