Earlier this year in May, I was able to purchase my first few BTC. I saved bitcoin-qt version 0.8.1-beta to a USB drive and also saved a copy of my wallet.dat file to another USB drive. Now when trying to view my balance, I synced with the network and see a balance of 0. I know the coins are still there because I viewed the address on blockchain info. I tried opening my wallet.dat file without having qt client running, but when I browse the files to open it with the qt client it doesnt add it to the list of programs to use. I downloaded the 0.8.5-beta version, but that didn't change anything either. Any ideas? Thank you!
Sounds to me like you're not caught up on the blockchain.