First of all, no offense but this sounds pretty hilarious. :lol:
I don’t know exactly what happened and I’m not saying something hasn’t happened on your PC but I can’t really imagine how BitComet will update itself, by its own. It doesn’t have an automatic update feature, to my knowledge.
Especially I can’t figure out why it would choose v.1.09 which is 1 year old when the last version is v.1.19.
But since you’re into the upgrading business you should get the last version at least, anyway. Or you can very well choose to download and reinstall your previous version.
But anyway, to your problems.
You can set your video player on the Options–>Advanced page in the ui.preview_program_path entry.
Your second problem definitely sounds as a un-configured client.
You should test your line speed (with no programs using the Internet connection at testing time) at a site such as http://speedtest.net with several different servers and, preferably, on different times of the day, in order to come up with an average upload speed.
Then make sure you transform/have that value in B (bytes) multiples (such as KB, MB) not b (bits) and multiply it with 0.8. That should be your Max Upload Rate setting on your Connection page.
Also, depending on your upload speed, try running not to many tasks at once (the lesser the better) so that any one of them at any times can get at least a 10-12KB/s share of your set upload speed. And test your torrent download speed with a well-seeded torrent, such as Open Office, not some torrent which may have little aggregate copies of the resource you seek.
If after all these you still get very low speeds, then you may start thinking there is a problem.
(I’m assuming that you have a grey status light, haven’t you?)