is there a way to not expand the whole tree in this situation? this became the default recently, but i personaly never ever wanted it to behave like that.

what view is your default view?
what and where are you 'selecting all'?
what do you mean by "expand the whole tree"?
what OS? I cant get this to happen on Linux, so i'm not sure what exactly you are talking about.

I think he is saying about file selection when adding a new torrent, I agree is better do not expand. I think this was added by dev as a replacement for the find bar which have a lot of requests, but this is not a replacement and is annoying.

sorry for not being more descriptive.
yes i mean add new torrent window. sometimes i need to download 1 or few files only and i click select all > off and then select those files manually. but with automatic directory expansion it becomes a mess, because i have to shrink all folder and look throught so much stuff to find what was very easily found before. if somebody needs to expand all additional button would be a good solution.

i see what you are taking about now on my linux version.
i dont usually use the add transfer prompt so I hadn't noticed that it does that.
previous versions didn't do this?

No, is new behaviour of the last versions

+1
STOP expanding the tree!!!

from the news page:
Tixati version 2.75
transfer pre-load window Select All button will no longer expand all folders

i am very glad this is back.