Shareaza

I needed to download some magnet links, so I decided to install Shareaza as it is considered the most powerful P2P client.

But the success didn't happen. As I started Shareaza in Win7 at first time it begun to scan files on my hard drive from the very first moment and without my permission! I could not find any button to stop this process immediately. So I decided to change the download folder. But I couldn't do that as before i reached the proper settings tab Shareaza hung. May be not actually hung but became uncontrollable. It becomes uncontrollable even if I touch nothing during this scan.

As I don't like when software does something on my hard drive without without letting me to know about what it is doing at each moment, and secondly I don't like the software which does not respond to clicks and key presses for more than 30 secs (actually it did'nt respond for several minutes - I couldn't wait further) while doing some suspicious, I had to kill the process.
The situation repeated again and again and each time I had to kill Shareaza.

So it really annoyed me and I uninstalled it and will never try again.

It was completely unusable from very first seconds of its runtime.

Shareaza will scan and hash all files added to the Shareaza library.

Did you run the quick-start wizard (or whatever it is called nowadays), I thought it has a page for choosing what to share, it certainly should. Although in your case the issue was probably the default downloads location (which is shared by default) already being in use and having lots of files. Shareaza (and Windows and browsers, for that matter) assumes the downloads folder to be a temporary holding place for files you have downloaded from the internet and not be a holding place for large numbers of files. Obviously this assumption is often false. Does the start-up wizard allow choosing the downloads and incomplete folder locations? If not, that should be added as the defaults might be annoying or even not functional.

The reason Shareaza gets stuck when adding new shared files to the library is because the event loop is busy while adding a file. Adding a single file doesn't really take much time, but if you add lots of files at the same time it all adds up and Shareaza will spend significant time not responding to events. The reason it is done this way is because the file add needs to be synchronized into several different parts of Shareaza. It might be a good idea to optimize this out of the event loop, but cases of people adding files without meaning to are pretty rare and when you add them on purpose having it be busy for some time is much less annoying... Although I still prefer to add files in batches of few hundred.

During install Shareaza shows what folders will be shared (and hashed). You can choose.

Shareaza can "freeze" in very few situations for example on enormous amount (> 10 000) of shared files. How big your library are?

Would it be possible to throttle "watch folders" so that it would only add a limited number of files per cycle and then make all file adds work thru "watch folders"? (It would have to "watch" even if "watch" is disabled after sharing folders until all files have been added.) I've had the "share folders" freeze permanently on just 4000 or so files and even in smaller chunks it can feel unresponsive. Since nothing actually happens until the files have been processed and hashed throttling the add should not be a problem.