There is some other software blocking the downloads on my laptop. 
The weird thing is, to get around this I installed bittorrent on my laptop which is able to download.  Utorrent and bittorrent look and function 100% the same.  The difference is in the coding.  I think they have two teams of programmers.  The only advantage of utorrent is that it has faster transfer rates.  I don't know why.

What I do is use bittorrent to download files, and when the files complete, they are imported automatically into utorrent to seed them.  That way I can shut down my uploads from my giant 8TB external drive without interrupting my downloads in progress with bittorrent.

i keep getting secure connection error when i try to upload

also how do i seed/re-seed? im trying to get my ratio up and uploading won't work so i'd try seeding but i can't figure out how to do it

im using qbittorrent if that means anything

I don't have a fix for you, but an alternative solution.
I think qbittorrent is a different company than bittorrent. 
Bittorrent makes both "bittorrent" and "utorrent" which look and function exactly alike, but are coded by two different teams of programmers. 
I prefer utorrent, because it seems to transfer files faster, however for some reason, utorrent stopped downloading files and only uploads them.
So now, I used bittorrent to download files, and although I could use bittorrent to upload (seed) the files - I instead save the bittorrent files and torrent files into the auto-load directory of Utorrent.  That way, Utorrent never downloads anything, but instead automatically imports the files from bittorrent and seeds them.  Another advantage of that is I can shut down my downloads (bittorrent) without affecting my uploads (utorrent) or vice versa.

In your case, I would suggest installing bittorrent or utorrent and see if they solve your problem.  Since my utorrent won't download, I suggest you try bittorrent first.

I have one theory about why my utorrent isn't downloading.  Utorrent is the most popular and widely used torrent client.  Because of that, it might be attacked by malware or blocked by ISP's that hate torrents because they use a massive amount of bandwidth.