A few days ago I was about to use the linq to SQL column property "Delay Loaded" for the first time. I wanted to return some plain data objects with an (propably larger) Image field left empty to load it later only if the entity would be selected in the GUI. So I used one Method to give me a set of objects with an empty image field and later another method to give me a specific image.
I already knew this Delay Loaded-Property would cause the creaton of a System.Data.Linq.Link<T> internally. So I thought as soon as I would do a read-access to that image-column the full content would be loaded from the database (though even write-accesses will imply a pre-read of that data so dont think about avoiding loading huge data by setting the field to another value).
I used my datacontext in a using block where I typically set the ObjectTrackingEnabled to false because I dont needed that if I only do readings to the DB. But in fact it turned out that this would also avoid loading fields that are "Delay Loaded" - so ObjectTrackingEnabled set back to true and everything worked fine as long as I initially accessed the image field inside the using-construct (ok that makes sense easily..).
I checked against the documentation where I found a short page about how to retrieve information as read-only and found out that setting OTE to false will also set DeferredLoadingEnabled to false and that would skip the expanding of one-to-one and one-to-many relations - BUT no word about Linq.Links
Looking into the docs of DeferredLoadingEnabled also told me that if OTE is false DLE is not only set to false - its ignored completely - and again nothing about Delay-Loaded Fields. So maybe this info was helpful..