There are better ways to spend a morning

This morning, my computer had a new icon in the taskbar. It produced a balloon that said my computer was at risk, and started popping up warning notices all over the place, even though I hadn't clicked on anything. Clearly I'd been infested by scareware/ransomware, though I have no idea how.

I tried to download a current set of antivirus definitions, and the process was blocked by the virus. I keep my antivirus definitions up to date, but the actual software is probably outdated. I gave up on trying to fix the problem at my end, and paid $90 to McAfee for a virtual technician. (That's what they call it; in fact, it's a real technician who takes over your computer and fixes the problem remotely.) It was fascinating to watch my computer doing things by itself, like a player piano. And I lost a lot less time doing it this way than I would have by hauling my computer over to the Geek Squad, the way I did the last time this happened. (That time, I know what caused it -- I clicked on a toxic link.)

I also bought a three-year subscription for McAfee's latest and greatest total protection suite, which is probably overkill, but was only $5/year more than the regular package. Unfortunately, it didn't want to download and install cleanly, which necessitated another session with tech support, and another hour or so wasted.

All in all, I didn't get really functional until well after noon. And Monday is always a busy day. After a couple of hours' overtime today, and a serious slog tomorrow, I should be caught up. But really, if it had to happen, I would have preferred it to happen during one of the slack times. And I still wish I know how it got through in the first place.

AKICILJ: McAfee Total Protection vs. BitTorrent

I installed McAfee Total Protection yesterday. Today, I fired up BitTornado, my BitTorrent client of choice. Apparently the firewall has blocked everything torrent-related, because all it does it show the "Starting up..." message and nothing else. After a long time, it showed a message in red that said "ERROR -- Couldn't listen - unable to forward port via UPnP."

I assume it's the settings in McAfee that are causing the problem. I went into the firewall section and added BitTornado to the list of programs that are allowed access to the Internet. But I assume there's some magical port-related thing that needs to be fixed as well. I'd really rather not turn the firewall off altogether, since I think having it is a generally fine idea. But assuming I'm not breaking things by torrenting (and assuming the files I'm torrenting are clean), what do I need to do to make a torrent-sized hole in the firewall?

Help?

ETA: I turned off the firewall temporarily, and started up BitTornado again. Same result. So it's not simply the firewall. But it has to be something in the protection suite.

ETA later: Fixed. Disabling UPnP forwarding in BitTornado solved the problem.