If all you're doing with the Pi is downloading/seeding torrents, you might want to consider running transmission-daemon by itself and avoid running a GUI at all on the Pi.

Transmission-daemon is a torrent client that runs as a background service (like the SSH server) instead of a GUI desktop application. I think there's a command-line tool you can use to interact with it, but there is also a web interface which does everything I need.

All you'd have to do is install transmission-daemon and set it up, then you can access the web interface via http://pi-ip-address:9091/transmission/. (You'll have to make sure that you have your IP address whitelist set up properly).
I believe there may also be a way to use the GTK+ client on one machine to manage the transmission-daemon server on another machine, but I haven't tried it.

One quick setup article:
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-set-u...-web-interface

Config file documentation:
https://github.com/transmission/tran...guration-Files

Thanks maples,

That is an interesting idea. I have a third Pi as a test machine so I can give it a try without breaking my "production" BT machine

As far as my current issue... Once I removed the clock, volume control, network manager and anything else I found in the notification area on the right end of the top Mate panel I have not had any issues. My swapswap script - which brings on the second swap area and then turns off the first one (and then re-arms to to the reverse) to flush swap and cause the cpu to take back memory which is really not in use - has not run in several days. This tells me that swap has never exceeded 512K used.

I will look into the BT daemon and see what I can setup.

Thanks again,

Ken