Good thing for them that the state of Bittorent clients is rather stale and mediocre, there's no way they would survive more competition with that behaviour.
He then sold µTorrent to Bittorrent inc (and went on to co-create Spotify), and from there on µTorrent has gone downhill as Bittorent inc are going for bundling adware/spyware in order to get a return on their investment.
I remember when it first came out it was the smallest client available, and that's why it gained a huge following - it was unintrusive and required no installation.
uTorrent 1.1.1: 82KB
uTorrent 3.4.2: 1.66MB
I have a feeling that most of that 20x(!) size increase is not due to any new features in the core torrent functionality. In fact, it appears to be the same size as the official BitTorrent Inc. client... I haven't looked carefully at the code, but just from this comparison I'd bet that it's not really uTorrent anymore but the BitTorrent client with a different UI.
I suggest Deluge, or maybe Transmission.
edit: retracting Transmission recommendation because I'm unfamiliar with it's state on Windows. Looks like there are builds, but I've never used them.
It does it's job well enough, ads can be easily disabled via advanced settings, it works in portable mode without even having a chance to install bundled crapware, the UI does not make my eyes bleed.
You can also add hosts file entries to block application ads after dumping network traffic to find the servers, you can edit binaries with a hex editor and debugger to patch out code paths. But should you need to, just to make it usable? What amount of work is needed to make it not-terrible before it can be declared terrible?
Can you develop?
* When you're under active torrents, select a torrent, wait for it to become unactive (ie going from downloading to done), the torrent is unselected (because it's not in view anymore) and the details of the torrent are not available. With µ if you select a torrent it's selected until you select something else no matter what states the torrent goes through and which view you're in.
* When adding a new torrent, the default destination is always the same, in µTorrent it's the last place you downloaded. When I add a torrent, the content always goes into a sub folder depending on type, it's much more likely that the last destination I used is the correct one (say I want to download a couple of music albums)
* The UI when adding a torrent is just cluttered and confusing and I have, a couple of times managed to enter the "add torrent-file"† instead of the "select destination for download" dialogue because it's such a mess
† Why is this even accessible from the prompt I get when I double click on a torrent in my file explorer? When would I ever double click on a torrent file, and then want to select a different torrent file? So unnecessarily messy.
I develop. Did not know Deluge was using Python. I might contribute one day, but doing front-end stuff is not really something I enjoy
I always try to install a new program as a limited user (sadly, most programs that come with an installer require administrative rights).
Recently i moved over to tixati as my preferred torrent client.