I suspect you don't need to suspend; just unplug the network cord for the same amount of time.
When I use a single peer, disconnect cable for a few hours and reconnect it, it says I have the 1 peer but no blocks are downloaded until I restart bitcoin-qt. I doubt this is new in 0.7.
i don't understand this, why would you disconnect your internet connection? why not just restart the bitcoin client?
the blockchain will download faster if you connect to a single peer using maxconnections=1, as long as you connect to the right peer (with connect=), you dont have to set maxconnections=1 if you dont allow incoming connections.
but if it's just some random peer, then, yes, i would say there's a 95% chance that you will be screwed