Looking for ideas about Torrent privacy

I'm fairly new to the whole downloading thing, and I recently stumbled across torrents.

I understand the process, peer to peer sharing. However, in light of some of the content available, it seems keeping your IP private would be advantageous.

I've seen TorrentPrivacy software, and that looks interesting, but I'm not well versed enough to know if that really offers adequate protection.

Is there a "right" way to download and/or upload materials that will help keep you out of trouble? Besides legal trouble, I don't want to purposefully make my entire hard drive available somehow to someone else.

Comments and advice would be greatly appreciated.

you can use proxies with torrents, uTorrent has this option I think

About your last comment:
You can't make your whole harddrive available or such a thing, torrent works through a torrent file, there is a specific filename plus a hash string of that file, so the people can only upload/download the exact same file, as it is specified in the torrent file. So you are relatively safe from viruses and trojaners, at least as long as you only upload, the moment you start downloading, well the creator of the file can put anything into it, trojans, viruses, worms.

And well, you can use proxies or vpn or anything, although nothing is 100% secure, I think VPN is the most secure you can find(as long as you take a good provider) ... but I am a noob at that sort of thing, so don't rely only on my words.

If you want more privacy, try http://www.ipredator.se (read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPREDator ) which is a VPN service operated by the Pirate Bay folks, so they are trustworthy no to log your activity.
I've also stumbled upon hidemyass.com/vpn/ they also have a very promising privacy policy. They have more servers in multiple countries (choose the closest one to you).