When I set up my newest media server I could not get the permissions to work on deluge with a mounted network drive for the life of me. Dumped a good 20 hours into it with minimal success.
Gonna be honest here i loved transmission until one day it just decided to stop working, no fixes would work, not even a full reinstall of it. Switched to qBit and it just worked so whatever
Uninstalling and reinstalling won't delete the settings in your home directory. Sounds like you might have had a bad sector that hit that file for some reason though.
It it just me or does Deluge after a while use a lot of RAM? I keep using it, because I'm too lazy to look for an alternative. Maybe it's just a memory leak in my linux distro's version.