qBittorrent official forums

Any idea what might be causing this? There are no torrent files added, & i've tried with & without firewall or vpn turned on. Also tried some of the older versions of QB.

In qBitTorrent:
Disable
(in connection) uTP, UPnP/NAT-PMP,
(in BitTorrent) DHT, LPD,
(in advanced settings) Check for updates, Resolve Peer Countries (GeoIP), Download tracker's favicons, Always announce to all trackers in a tier, Always announce to all tiers.

Also in advanced settings, reduce Maximum number of half-open connections to 1.

This should set qBitTorrent so it shouldn't be making any connections on startup if there's no torrents loaded.
...Which means it shouldn't cause no internet access.

But if that works, it means you probably have bad networking drivers (or malware that affects networking) and/or a bad modem/router and/or your ISP is doing the blocking!

Is the internet access only dropping for that machine or the entire network?

[quote="Switeck"]
and/or your ISP is doing the blocking!
[/quote]

Is that actually a thing, not saying they couldn't do it. But dropping connection just by running the program without any active torrents sounds a bit wild.

The ISP may see DHT traffic or something else and treat that as "unallowed" traffic on their network.
Sometimes the case for college WANs or business nets.