I think I read somewhere that if he has any connections, he is connecting to the IRC channel just fine... I think you're correct on the 8 connection limit without having port 8333 forwarded.

My thinking was that the static IP -addnode would help by providing a dedicated download source. If that still doesn't work well then I'd guess that laszlo has hit the nail on the head, and the constant full-rewrite of the file is to blame.