You don’t need to reboot: you only need to stop and start BitComet, but with an awareness of what you are trying to do.
As Wiz pointed out, you don’t seen to have that awareness. Let’s try this.
BitComet keeps track of its tasks by writing them to a certain .xml file.
When you add a new task, which we’ll label “task Alpha”, to BC, it adds that task to its internal list and tries to re-write that list, to that file.
Therefore, you can add task Alpha to BC, then immediately shut BC down, and then start BC back up again. If the list got written to the file, and if you told BC to resume tasks at startup, then BC should try to read that file for its old task list and come up showing task Alpha in the list, in the same status (running, stopped, paused) that it had when you shut down.
If this doesn’t happen, then it is because
The file never got written for some reason
The file can’t be read for some reason, including that it was never written in the first place.
You don’t have BC set to resume tasks at startup, so it didn’t try to read the file.
It takes only the time to add the task, terminate BC, and start it up again, in order to see if something went wrong. It’s not arduous or difficult to do this. You especially don’t need to wait for Vista to ponderously reboot.
If the task list comes up blank, then first check again that BC is set to resume new tasks at startup. I know you just checked it, check it again. If it is now NOT set to do that even though you just did, then BC is having the same problems with its preference file, that it is having with its tasklist – unable to write to, or unable to read from, the file.
If the task list comes up blank and BC is set to resume tasks, then BC couldn’t read its task list. Use Windows Explorer to go and see if the downloads.xml file is there. If it isn’t, that’s the problem. If it is, open the file in notepad and look at it. You don’t need to make sense of it, just confirm that it’s not completely blank and you somewhat recognize the tasks it lists.
If old tasks keep coming back while new tasks disappear, then BC is likely not able to write to the file. When you restart BC, it reads an older version of the file containing those old tasks and NOT containing the new tasks – because BC was unable to overwrite that old file for some reason – probably either a permission problem or a location problem.
You will need to figure out which one it is, and to fix it.
Use Windows Explorer to navigate to the location where the file is supposed to be. Is it there? If so, can you delete it? If you can’t, this is likely a big part of your problem, so fix that. If it isn’t there, then can you create a file with that name using notepad? If you can’t, ditto, ditto. If you don’t see any xml files there at all, are you sure you’re looking in the right place? You are almost certainly not, and need to triple-check.
