When I downloaded bitcoin onto my laptop, I think it took well over 24 hours to sync. However, I did eventually determine that the btrfs I use was heavily fragmenting the block chain index file and causing performance to crawl. By periodically defragmenting the bitcoin files, things finally finished loading.

My problem is that I always want to do things "the right way." If a lightweight client is less secure, then I don't want to use it. Electrum depends on a central server, Armory looks good but is still alpha code.. no way I trust any amount of money to that! Multibit looks good but doesn't encrypt the wallets. Again, there is no way I would trust an unencrypted wallet, and I'm not about to install TrueCrypt onto my PC just for this insecure client. I also don't want to leave much money in an online account given the number of thefts.

It seems like another year could do a lot to mature the lightweight clients as bitcoin gains popularity. In the meantime I will do things the hard way with the original bitcoin client.