Shareaza

Hardware: dual core Intel.
OS: Windows Vista SP2.
Shareaza version: 2.4.0.0
Nature: infrequent and intermittent; severe.

Sometimes Shareaza causes the system to freeze for up to tens of seconds at a time, repeatedly, until shut down and restarted. The freezing continues, diminishing, for quite a while after Shareaza is closed, which is especially odd. Setting Shareaza's priority to Below Normal and forcing it to only use one core does not do more than slightly mitigate it.

This seems to mainly happen when searching -- not when just downloading or uploading, or idle and connected, or idle and not connected. It seems unrelated to hashing, happening when no hashing is going on.

this has been looked at already. try one of the daily builds or wait until the next release

Won't those be even more unstable?

(I'd love to know how 2.4.0.0 is able to bypass all priority and affinity controls set by the operating system and seize complete control of all cores for extended periods of time. I'm sure Microsoft would, too. And a lot of shady characters with .ru domain names.)

I've checked a few things meantime. Most notably, it isn't caused by Shareaza deciding to become a hub. It still happens if it's set to leaf mode only, in fact.

One weird thing: when it comes out of a freeze, sometimes I see windows shuffle around in the taskbar briefly, or a visible one demaximize and remaximize, all by itself. Sometimes a taskbar item will blink for attention but have no news. Occasionally VideoLAN will spontaneously start up or Google Chrome spontaneously reload the page it's on or even grab focus. And I get a lot of firewall popups for random applications trying to access the internet that normally don't. Is Shareaza generating bogus WM_FOO messages that appear to be from other applications and freeze up the Windows event loop, as well as causing random behavior in other applications that get unsolicited messages, or are faked as the senders of same?

That would be quite a strange bug though.

I need to know of a workaround for this now.

P.S. the new forums suck. If I simply try to reload a page or browse the forums after logging in and then doing other things for a while, I get a password-entry popup. If I cancel that I get 403 errors.

I should not get 403 errors merely viewing stuff.

In fact, if I use the back menu to go to the Google search for "shareaza" that I used to navigate here, then navigate back manually by clicking links, I don't get any password prompts or 403 errors unless I try to post something. This should give identical results to reloading the page, other than being more annoying and tedious.

Making matters worse, although I told *both* the site *and* Firefox to remember my login, neither does so and the prompt always comes up blank.

Please fix this, too.

sorry, I didn't mean to mislead you, It was just a suggestion. I know there were problems (that were supposedly fixed) with the search being really slow and sometimes freezing shareaza, so I thought it might be related since you said that it often happened while you were searching.

As for the forums, that is out of our control since they are managed by sourceforge staff. and yes, we know it, is very annoying.

So what you're saying is that 2.4.0.0 is unusable on Vista, you don't know why, there's no known workaround, and nobody is actually bothering to fix it.

Well, that's just great.

Frostwire, here I come.

to the best of my knowledge, no. Perhaps one of the other forum helpers knows more and can help you.

Please remember that everyone who helps out here is volunteers. Nobody is paid for there services here. Everybody who helps out here does it purely because they love shareaza. We are not experts and none of us claim to be, so please try to be patient and polite.

doesnt freeze computer, but hangs internet. Whether im playing xbox or surfing the web, shareaza by being simply connected to gnutella 1+2, makes it so everything else is slow. Network is port forwarded for shareaza udp and tcp. Dont know what else to try. When i disconnect from networks, everythings fast. Down speed is 10000kbps and up speed is 500kbps.

Thanks for any help, Keith

Hahahaha.
It's simple: you have a limited amount of bandwidth. Each internet connected software (including xbox games, browsers, etc...) uses a part of the bandwidth. Shareaza uses its bandwidth getting files from other computers. The higher Shareaza bandwidth usage, the less it remains for other software.

The only thing I can think of that would cause that is, if you have too many searches and downloads all going at once.