uTorrent with VPN leads to UTM9 crash

I run UTM9 (9.004033) on VMWare ESXi 5. This is a home setup, nothing fancy.

The setup has been running stably for 4 months at least. In last couple of days, I have stumbled upon a strange problem.

I have Windows Home Server on which I installed OpenVPN to connect to a paid VPN service. The connection to paid VPN service works just fine. Then I installed uTorrent client on the Windows Home Server. For testing, I tried to download a file from torrent with the OpenVPN connected. As soon as I did that, within seconds, I lost all connectivity to UTM9.

I could not even connect to VMWare server through management interface. When I checked the VMWare server console, it had the purple screen of death (crash with dump of hex numbers on screen). I had to reboot the server.

I tested the scenario at least 10 times with different torrent files, and every time I started download, either the VMWare server crashed or UTM became unreachable.

I cannot ping UTM, I cannot ping the management network of VMWare server, no access via SSH, nothing. The only way out is to reboot the VMWare server.

In next phase of testing, I started the download without making the OpenVPN connection. Since I had not created any firewall rules to allow torrent traffic, the download never started but there was no crash.

In third phase of testing, I created firewall rules to allow torrent traffic. Now the torrent downloads work fine without the OpenVPN connection. With OpenVPN+uTorrent, I run into either UTM9 becoming unreachable or VMWare crashing. The crash happens within seconds of starting download.

I am at a loss to troubleshoot. Even if something is terribly wrong, why would running anything on a Windows Home Server result in crash of UTM9/VMWare?

Any ideas will be appreciated.

Thanks...
Arun