Cannot download after upgrading OS X 10.7->10.9

[metaclam]

After upgrading from 10.7.5 to 10.9.4, transmission (2.8.4) will no longer download torrents. It seems to be uploading mostly.

Factors:

1. my ~/Library/Application Support/Transmission/ directory is on an external drive, and symlinked. I have this set up for a dual system boot setup, and it worked fine when on 10.7.5.

2. port is open

3. have tried restarting computer 1 time and relaunching transmission several times. tried reinstalling transmission 2 times.

4. tried deleting org.m0k.*.plist files in preferences, emptying trash, relaunching. oddly, the existing preferences still persisted. not sure how that's possible unless some backup is kept in /App Support/ ??

5. I want to avoid at nearly all costs trashing the /App Support/ folder. I do not want to have to redo thousands of torrents, or recreate my groups.

6. i have disabled app nap, as suggested in another post.

Is it possible that I'm not giving Transmission enough time to announce all the torrents to the trackers before it starts downloading? I never experienced that as an issue before on 10.7; torrents would start soon after launch.

the non-starting downloads say "announce is queued" in the inspector. this after 60 minutes?

is there anything needed from the debug log?

thanks.

PS, pls see this thread:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1651836

[metaclam]

fixed.

turns out it was outdated entries in my /etc/hosts file that was causing the problem. they were valid entries when I last used the then 10.8 system for testing purposes, but were no longer valid. removing them from the hosts file resolved the issue.