Hello, lovelies. QBT was working well in both directions. Now it isn't. The little fire icon at the bottom of the screen is always on. I've downloaded, but peer connections don't seem to be working. I've been all over the internet trying to troubleshoot, to no avail. I posted on Reddit, but then the exodus happened. 1.) It's not the firewall (Bitdefender). There's a rule in place. Also, I turned off the firewall, and nothing changed. I tried enabling port scanning. Nothing changed. 2.) I went to Nord's advice page https://support.nordvpn.com/Connectivity/Proxy/1087802472/Proxy-setup-on-qBittorrent.htm
and followed their directions, screenshot attached. Part of their instructions include going to ipleak.net and using ipleak's magnet link. Nord says addresses are supposed to match. They didn't. Here are screenshots. I tried different servers. I tried a P2P server. 3.) In the absence of help during the exodus, I reset Windows network connections. Nothing changed. I reinstalled Windows 11 (what a PIA!). Nothing changed. Since reinstalling all software, QBT ratios show nobody's downloaded anything from me, which is unusual, even though stuff I like has small swarms.

4.) I tried reinstalling QBT. Then I tried versions 4.5.3, 4.5.2, and 4.5.1. Nothing changed. The little orange flame is still burning. In case it matters, the only place I'm torrenting from/to is rutracker.

If you read this far, tyvm. If you've got suggestions, thank you even more.