I am still in the middle of this as well...started 6 days ago and still only 84% completed! It also seems the past few days it takes a solid 24 hours to sync up with a month of transactions, looks like it will take another week at this rate to complete! Seriously, is this normal? I tried the Bootstrap but that also ran for more than 2 days with no status display, finally cancelled and thought would do it the old fashioned way...really puzzling.
I am showing 11 active connections, no connection speed problems on my end at least.
I synced my wallet the old fashioned way too.

Sometimes, as I recall, it seemed to freeze up on certain blocks or something. If the wallet's been online and connected for a long time (like 5 + hours) and it looks like no blocks are syncing or it seems to get very slow at syncing I've found it can help if you restart the client. Other than that it is probably normal to expect about a month to download and sync the entire blockchain from scratch. I think if you do it the old fashioned way, it includes all of the orphans, that's why its much slower. All of the orphan blocks need to sync too so it is extra slow. But, once you get there, Mintcoin is the fastest coin, faster than any coin I know, so it's worth it once you're up and running! When you do transactions or move funds, the confirmations come in basically instantaneously. It is really nice. Plus, once you are synced you can start minting! So it's definitely worth it in the long-run.