I downloaded the bitcoin wallet program yesterday. After 24 hours+ it is still "synchronizing with network". About how long does this process take these days?
On slower equipment it could be three days even.
Having an encrypted filesystem will really slow things down. Having your computer go to sleep on inactivity will really slow things down.
There are a couple tricks to speeding it up if starting from scratch (e.g., pull down bootstrap.dat from torrent) but you are probably well past getting any benefit from that.