I'm not sure what the reason could be for this, but it's not necessary and it's also problematic.
TLDR: You can drop in the most recent x64 qbittorrent.exe to replace the x32 bit version and it should actually run better.
The 32bit version was causing a lot of problems on my machine:
When I was running the x32 bit version on my win10 x64, it didn't perform well at all. But it only happens during certain circumstances.
For example, when downloading to any kind of external media. It seems to do "okay" when downloading to the internal SSD, but the speeds do seem limited. I can easily get 25MegaBYTEs a second over my cable connection and it rarely got anywhere in the teens.
But back to the external drive problem. It didn't seem to matter whether or not it was a flash 3.0USB or a external HDD usb 3.0, the user interface ALWAYS would start freezing up as soon as any download speed started to build up. I had no idea what was causing this problem for several weeks. It was really frustrating too. Sometimes I would limit the upload speed to 1KB/s because that would tend to slow everything down enough that I could at least use the interface (somewhat). It would still freeze every so often and after 10-15 seconds or so, it would resume again. It felt a lot like syncronous i/o blocking in terms of server-client connections. Felt that way, but it was definitely something to do with the x32 bit version.
To be clear, I did check over on GitHub several times for other people talking about anything similar to what I was experiencing and I never saw anything. This had me quite confused, and I held off making a bug report because I wasn't sure if it was something on my end.... it was.
So I booted up one of my Windows LTSC virtual machines and downloaded a fresh copy of the x64 bit program and installed it on the VM. Once I had the executable, I reset the VM snapshot to before I installed it, and then I simply dropped the x64 executable into the qBittorrentPortable directory in the respective location. I didn't mess around with changing anything with the PA Launcher I just wanted to see if it would run if i simply replaced the x32 bit executable. It did. It runs fine. I checked the %LocalAppData% directory and watched as I opened and closed qBittorrentPortableX64. All of the associated data is created and removed as expected. I also checked and didn't see anything being created in either of the %TMP% directories. I did the best I could looking through the registry and didn't seem to see anything that wasn't created by Windows it's self.
Since then, I've been running my new qBittorrentPortablex64 on my physical machine (which I try not to install things on). It runs smooth AF and I'm getting speeds back where they should be 25-30MB/s.
I really think the version hosted here should be updated. But failing that, maybe this info will help somebody else if they've been having problems downloading to external drives with qBittorrentPortable. Lots of people try not to wear out their system SSD by torrenting. Anyway, thanks for reading.