Malwarebytes is blocking attempts by tixati.exe to connect to 178.175.x.x on a regular basis, every 15 minutes or so. All I can determine is that addr is in Moldavia, but I'm not very skilled in these sorts of things. It was suggested that this could be peer activity so I disabled outgoing torrents as well as DHT, and then tixati tried to connect to 82.202.x.x which appears to be in Russia.  I would seem that my PC's been hijacked but scans show up nothing -- though that doesn't necessarily means I'm clean of course -- but since tixati is doing the work I don't know what to think.  Could this actually be part of the legitimate code, and if so why?.

Can anyone comment?

If you are seeding a torrent then it's completely normal. Malwarebytes often blocks normal connections just because YOLO.

Try using Tixati on Linux. It's completely normal for torrent clients to connect to such addresses.