i have never used a torrent program before. i know i have bittorrent installed on my computer. when i go to a website and try to download a torrent, the bittorrent application comes up, but nothing will download. the elapsed time increases, but thats it. any ideas?

Are there seeders of the torrent? Could your ISP be blocking torrents? Are you behind a firewall?

im not sure what seeders are. im on a university's network.

Seeders are those who are uploading the file you are trying to download. Many universities, however, do block bittorrent traffic. You might try setting an alternate port. Which bittorrent client are you using?

Well, having worked as a university's support tech, I'd suggest that you don't start messing around with the port details: most universities have someone in the networks team that'll be checking for strange activity, and torrenting through any port will definitely flag up, due to the high number of outgoing and incoming connections that it creates.
To be honest with you, I'd say leave it for now. Use your own broadband, when you go home: the university IT staff will probably hit you like a ton of razorblades, given the opportunity: regardless of whether you're torrenting something legitimate or not: most of the/their bosses have caught the "torrnts are bad, m'kay" bug.

However, if you limit the upload to approximately 20k, and limit the download to around 40k, and use port 80, you *may* get away with it, provided you're not looged in to one of their machines, or have registered your own machine with them. Not that I'd recommend it particularly, but it's just a thought

If the university policies don't prohibit bittorrent, you should be fine. They might complain, but they have no real recourse against you.

I did a huge amount of torrent downloading while I was in residence and no one ever bothered me. Depends on the university.

in windows i was able to do p2p file sharing without any problem. i know that the school has a policy against illegal music downloads, but i dont think they have ever acted upon anyone, its more just to save them incase of any trouble. what would i have to do to change the port details. how would this accomplish anything?

I used to use utorrent on my old computer but i recently got a new computer and now it wont let me download torrents. When i click on the torrent link the typical "Run" "Save" or "Cancle" box showes up and when I go click on run or save, it tells me the torrent is downloading and then 1-3 seconds later it tells me it is done. of course i can open the file because it actually hasn't downloaded anything. At the time of compleation the file downloaded is alway about 1/10th the size of the file i was trying to download. When i do try to open it i get a dialog box that says "Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file." any ideas?