Make uTorrent run on the same process started by a scheduled windows task

Question

I've created a task in Task Scheduler to make uTorrent start on Windows start up whether the user is logged on or not. There's a problem! When uTorrent starts at system startup, it runs in the background. When I log on my user account and open uTorrent, I find that two separate instances (processes) of uTorrent are running. This would be like using two separate programs to download the same file at the same directory simultaneously. This would probably damage the file downloading process, including draining resources.

When I open it manually, How could I make uTorrent run on the same process without running a separate process?

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Illustrative screenshots

After I logged on my account, and before I open uTorrent.

After I've opened uTorrent, you see two separate running uTorrent background processes.

Answer 1

If you want to have uTorrent running without having to log on, you'll either have to set up a little script that shuts down any existing instances down when you start it in your session (and then another to start it as a service again when you log off), or interact with it exclusively over the web interface.

The shutdown can be instant (force-killing the process) or slow but safe (sending a close signal and waiting for it to finish up). TASKKILL /im utorrent.exe will close it, and adding /F will force-kill it. A batch file like this will combine the two, force-killing after 30 seconds.

REM Seconds to wait set _timer=30 taskkill /im utorrent.exe :testloop REM Sleep 1 second PING -n 2 127.0.0.1>nul set /a _timer=_timer-1 if "%_timer%"=="0" goto :finish tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq utorrent.exe" 2>NUL | find /I /N "utorrent.exe">NUL if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" goto :testloop :finish taskkill /im utorrent.exe /f c:\path\to\uTorrent.exe

To get it to restart when you log off or close it, modify the Task slightly to first check if uTorrent.exe is running, and then launch it if it isn't. A batch file like this is sufficient:

tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq utorrent.exe" 2>NUL | find /I /N "utorrent.exe">NUL if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="1" c:\path\to\uTorrent.exe

Have it run every ten minutes or so. The chance of a conflict with the previous batch is possible, but extremely unlikely.

The web interface was made specifically for this use case, but it's not nearly as convenient to use as the native GUI, especially not for adding torrents. I'm not aware of any native GUI torrent clients that are split into client/server, all of them seem to have web interfaces instead. If uTorrent was split in two, it'd be perfect.