I routinely disable DHT while using bittorrent, because I have the tools used to exploit it. By exploit I mean, track what you are downloading and your ip. You can find these open source tools by searching for 'bittorrent dht' on M$ Codeplex. So I am not very impressed by the huge DHT icon in Tixati. Recently saw a few files I had downloaded at scaneye.net and I saw the same thing a couple years ago. Progress seems to be slow as to any kind of a fix, besides like your ip subnet being used to generate your encrypted unique DHT node id. Which suggests to me merely limiting the attack from a single ip and not from the big shot with multiple ips. With increasing threat, I thought this needs to be more widely known, so that it will pressure the bittorrent authors and save some users from threating letters. It is a very technical subject, so I will be greatly oversimplifying. DHT was implemented a few years after bittorrent to reduce the load on bittorrent trackers. PeX was implemented also, it is not nearly as capable as DHT though. The copyright trolls could crawls trackers, but it would be obvious to the trackers operators and they just ban the ip's. DHT causes your client to behave as a tracker for the particular file you are downloading. And there is no tools for you to really monitor and understand which peer might be a troll that just keeps asking your client how much of a the file you have. The 100% is a sure sign you have all of it. Who has download parts of a file from peers indicating 0% besides me? The source code is on my Codeplex project, if only just to make it more available.
So I guess you recommend to disable DHT? 1) Does it affect my downloading speed? 2) Can it be done in Tixati or only in uTorrent?