@pallas: yeah the problems with syncing from scratch have existed for a long time. In my experience the best way to sync is to add a node which is already fully synced and working properly, and configured to share blocks. What exactly does syncing "from scratch" mean though? If you haven't started your XCN wallet in several months it will try to catch up by downloading all the blocks it missed but there's no guarantee any node will have blocks several months old. If you download Cryptonite for the first time or you delete your block files it wont attempt to download every block ever made, it will only download blocks from the last week, but it will download all the block headers (aka the "proof chain"). That process is also known to be fairly buggy from what I remember but I've gotten it to work many times.

@Blockchain Mechanic: well I pretty much just explained the syncing process to pallas. One of the other reasons I believe syncing is so problematic is because Cryptonite was forked from Bitcoin at a time when Bitcoin had rather crappy networking code. When syncing I believe it only downloads the blockchain from a single peer. Since then Bitcoin has obviously improved the networking code and it now downloads blocks in parallel from many different peers but Cryptonite is still stuck with that crappy code, I truly don't know why anyone would create it to work that way in the first place.

@dextronomous: yeah don't worry I'll probably put the block explorer back up, but first I need to recode it to work a bit differently. Like I said I cannot really do much until I get home but that's near the top of my to-do list.