qBittorrent freezes computer and hard drive when starting large torrent

[qb001]

I never used to have this issue before with qBittorrent and have had nothing but a great experience using it until now.  When ever I load a large torrent file into qBittorrent it starts working just fine and the speed is really fast, then after about 5 seconds the speed slows down to 0 and my entire computer freezes.  I can move my mouse but qBittorrent is unresponsive and my hard drives wont load anything from them.  After anywhere from about 1-2 minutes qBittorrent starts downloading again and I can use my computer.  Sometimes though like last night my computer completely freezes and wont recover.

Has anyone had an issue similar to this and knows how to fix it?  This has been beyond frustrating and never used to happen.  I just did a system restore and it still happened, I don't know what to do except not use qBittorrent anymore.

[Switeck]

So this is happening with qBitTorrent v4.1.4 both when you set it to auto-allocate the entire contents of the torrent or when it's set to use sparse files?
(Under Options, Downloads, Pre-allocate disk space for all files)

[tedios]

same thing started happening to me as well for the past few days now - tried both pre-allocated and separately

[Switeck]

So that narrows the problem down to qBitTorrent (most likely)...or a new fast-spreading malware.