Torrent acting flaky

[Lanigiro]

I've come across a torrent that's giving me some trouble. According to kat.cr it has four seeders and two leechers. When I added it to Shareaza last night the torrent data dialog showed four seeders and two leechers, and the actual download window quickly had larger numbers of sources, well over a dozen. It began downloading normally. This afternoon I checked it again and it had stalled at about 1/6 downloaded. The torrent data dialog still showed the same three trackers, but listed zero seeders and two leechers, and all of the sources in the download window had long clock countdowns on them (ten, twenty, thirty-something minutes).

Sometime overnight or during the morning, something swept in like a scythe, it seems, interfering badly with this torrent and causing all connection attempts to all of the sources to be obstructed. The symptoms are how Shareaza would behave if suddenly all connection attempts were timing out.

Since the diverse assortment of sources were scattered all over the globe, the presumptive location of the point of failure is here.

I have since:
1. Restarted Shareaza, in case the running instance got into a corrupt internal state of some sort.
2. Changed my network-facing IP.
3. Rebooted all networking hardware at my end.
The problem has persisted. I can't seem to get the torrent to resume downloading. Whatever changed at my end to cause this can't be in the networking hardware, as changes there shouldn't have survived rebooting. It seems to be in Shareaza or the OS (Windows Vista) on the computer, and nonvolatile, since it survived restarting Shareaza. Likely Shareaza wrote something to its on-disk databases that is screwing up the torrent.

Unfortunately the one thing I could think to try only seems to have made things worse, and that was doing a "forget sources" on the torrent and restarting Shareaza so that the source discovery would "start over from scratch" without any memory of, hopefully, whatever had gotten screwed up (while keeping the already-downloaded portion of the file). But now it is only rediscovering one single source, out of around twenty, and it won't connect to that one.

I've tried clicking "refresh" after selecting various trackers in the torrent data dialog, but it has no effect. The seed count stays zero, the leech count jumps to either zero or one, and all four trackers for this torrent stay showing "Unknown" status, never becoming "Active" (or, for that matter, "Tracker down").

I'm at a loss here. Someone please tell me how to put the torrent back into the state it was in last night, where it could discover sources normally, without losing the already-downloaded sixth of the file.

Meta: Also, your forum server or its border firewall has, as of today, been responding to HTTP connect attempts incorrectly with RST packets when contacted from some IP addresses, though the one I'm using now is accepted by it (obviously). It looks like you may have dropped the banhammer on several large (multi-million-user) ISPs. I presume someone from one of those ISPs did something abusive, but you should be aware that the address range you blacklisted is enormous and used by a noticeable fraction of the population of the developed world. I suggest lifting the ban and finding some narrower set of IPs to block to keep the miscreant out, or finding some other punishment (nixing his forum account, perhaps?) that won't cause quite so much collateral damage.