After a few days of insanity (doing the same thing over and over hoping for a different result 
) I fixed the 'problem'. It turns out that my Linksys router was lying to me. All the port forwarding info looked correct and showed as being enabled when logged into the router, but it really wasn't. I unplugged the router for several minutes, and then did a reset on it. After entering the port forwarding information back into it everything now works. Block chain is up to date now and I'm up to 20 connections and growing. Linksys routers are nice and easy to use, I just wish that they weren't so flaky 
) I fixed the 'problem'. It turns out that my Linksys router was lying to me. All the port forwarding info looked correct and showed as being enabled when logged into the router, but it really wasn't. I unplugged the router for several minutes, and then did a reset on it. After entering the port forwarding information back into it everything now works. Block chain is up to date now and I'm up to 20 connections and growing. Linksys routers are nice and easy to use, I just wish that they weren't so flaky