I was unaware about adding BitCoin to the firewall (port forwarding?) so that it wouldn't have the 8 connection limit.  Now I am getting 16-20 active connections and it appears to be growing.  If this was done prior to the initial blockchain download (where I maxed out at 8 connections), I might have downloaded the blockchain in a few hours instead of it taking days.  I have dual core windows VPS with 100 Gbps connection; I was wondering WTF was taking so long to download blockchain. 

I'll have to watch now how much quicker transactions take to validate (used to be 1 hour for micro transactions <0.01 BTC)