Just looking at the stuff thats happened, I don't see any reason to stop using uTorrent yet. None of the accusations have been proven with valid packet logs. The main address they are accused of sending stuff to is a muticast address apparently that shouldn't be allowed past the router. (239.x range) Most of the reasons sites have banned 1.7.1 is because it had an issue with returning the wrong data for private trackers as to how much had been up/downloaded. This was fixed in the 1.7.2 release.
Basically all anyone has to do to get your IP address logged is to release a torrent with their IP in it as a tracker and you are logged as having downloaded that file. There is nothing you can do to prevent that from happening. If their IP is found out and banned by programs like peerguardian, it is a small matter to get a new IP and start it up again.
