Thanks very much for your help. Unfortunately i'm still showing as "wallet offline"....
I'm running windows through VMWare on a mac (if that matters).... i've turned off the firewall. Would you have any secondary suggestions? I'd hate to lose my infant 10k's...
make a 10k.conf file , add the nodes posted on the first page of this op. make sure when you make this file its not a 10k.conf.txt that wont work. it has to be a.conf extension. you may not notice you simply made a plain txt file instead.