Thanks for the replies everyone. I downloaded the bootstrap file and disabled secure messaging. It's still slow and the blockchain is at 48% downloaded, is that normal? With the way things have been going it'll still take weeks to get it to 100%. Anything else I can do?
I had to reload the blockchain a couple weeks back and had similar issues. just took forever.
I ended up using @ffmad's blockchain backup posted here:
http://shadowtalk.org/topic/359/wallet-update-1-3-1-0/7it not only had the blk0001.dat but also contained the "txleveldb" folder with the current .ldb databases. I believe a lot of the slow problems I was having revolved more around the txleveldb files I needed vs the blk0001.dat I could get straight from the bootstrap download here:
http://shadow.cash/downloads/bootstrap.datI got a file not found error.