Thanks for this amazing response! (above) I'll return to this many times. You explain things so well.

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More installation problems:

My bitcoin client has stopped displaying the progress bar and I think it actually went through all the blocks (took about 5-6 days, I lost count).

Now it's been doing this (see below) for the last 6 hours....  [feel like banging my head against the wall, I am fed up with this now]

Any idea what this is about and how long it would take for it to finish, or if there is anything I can do to speed it up...?
How can it STILL be out of sync, after all that it was doing for 6 days? What is it doing now?! (see status at bottom).

http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/2144/49276302.jpg