I am having a problem with Ktorrent and don't know what to do next. Below are the symptoms and what I have tried so far:

Symptoms:

• Starting three days ago, starting Ktorrent the window seemed to hang on fully drawing itself, as though it was reading for data off the disk and it was slow to read into Ktorrent.
• Sometimes upon starting the program, this message appears: "Could not download the proxy configuration script: Malformed URL ." A Google search of that term has not yielded anything useful with regard to Kubuntu
• Pressing Ctrl-Q repeatedly is necessary to remove Ktorrent from memory. Sometimes, it can only be exited by 'kill -9 <pid>'. Repeatedly performing Ctrl-Q sometimes results with a Window Manager warning "Application "ktorrent" is not responding...." and a prompt to terminate the application.

Steps tried:

• Checked and resolved disk errors on my disk containing Home partition
• Deleted all torrent data from "~/.kde/share/apps/ktorrent" <--directory for storing torrent data, not the actual ISO's or software, for example, a torrent provides
• reformatted drives to which some torrents point to
• deleted '/home/daniel/.kde/share/config/ktorrentrc' the config file for options to run Ktorrent

While the steps tried seem to have fixed the initial loading of Ktorrent, when the software is running, there seems to be lagging in reading or writing data to/from disk. The real-time data for time torrent is running hangs on a given second for up to 2 minutes. Because of whatever is happening to make the software hang, all network activity drops to 0 and then resumes after the lag ends. Then the whole lagging process repeats after a few seconds.

Performing a find on instances of 'ktorrent' on my Home folder yielded many instances similar to: "/home/daniel/.kde/share/config/session/ktorrent_1013c101d4110000141420737000000029670287_1415024525_573250"

What is the impact of deleting such files?

Thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope someone has some input to share.

Any input?