Hi Mike ... The main reason that people turn Chat Enabled on is because .. that way their shares are easier to browse.
If you click on chat with host, there is a small possibility a dialogue box will come up and if you are very lucky you will have managed to type and send Hi are you there before a message comes up saying "host unavailable" .... If you get this far, who knows you might get a reply, and when you reply back you will get so excited you will hit "block host" by mistake
The fact is that hosts traffic, firewalls, incompatibility of clients all prevent the system working very well. Also it is quite probable, if you get a message through that the other host will be nowhere near his computer for long periods of time.
All in all it is a fairly useless feature, ....... unless you get lucky
I wish it worked better, if only to tell hosts about faulty files, to ask for something, or to just say thank you.
So .. I'm sorry, but you might as well use a pidgeon