I have been on the Silk Road, haven't made a transaction there.  Configuring TOR is a bitch, and the site refuses access without TOR up & running properly on your machine.  After several hours, Firefox was the only browser I could get to actually load the page (Chrome and IE just would not get it up).  There is more info on the Silk Road here:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/silkroad/