bitcoin client strange behavior : causes heavy NW-traffic, no more confirmations

Hi there,

since a few days I'm having trouble with my bitcoin client. When I start it, it puts heavy load on my internet connection eating up all the available bandwidth. However it doesn't recieve anymore confirmations for my transactions. Also the number of blocks does not increase anymore.

I don't know what it does with all that bandwith and I'm afraid something is fishy.

I installed a network-monitoring tool, so I'm sure the traffic is caused by "bitcoin.exe". The PID shown there also matches the one shown in the taskmanager for the bitcoin-client-process.

In the past I got plenty of confirmations every second and also the load on my connection has only been a fraction of what it is now.

Has anyone an explanation for this ? Did anybody experience the same ?

thanks for your help

Dieter

P.S.: I already tried to give it some time (about 1h) so it can do whatever it has to do and hoped it would go back to normal operation but it didn't.