Just a recent occurence for me, been using tixati for a while now but all of a sudden it hangs on initializing files stage. The torrents take forever to initialize and after its done the progress and upload speed takes like 3-5 seconds to update kbs like its freezing on and off. Any help would be much appreciated thanks.

Nothing new, it's more or less like this since I started using Tixati. The drive works really hard ;) when initializing files. Maybe try sparse files allocation method, it's in local files section in Tixati settings. This is much faster but downloaded files will be very fragmented.