Hi Extro,

Correct me if I'm wrong Chicago -- but what I believe you are saying that you're able to get a 0.8.6 testnet client to do the mining, and are able to get you 0.15.99.08 to sync to this miner.
This would essentially be a rough work-around, imo, and it isn't sufficient to test the robustness, given that only the 0.8.6 clients would be doing the actual mining.
It does however keep the testnet alive until the issue of what's wrong with the built-in miner on the new version is fixed
Also, it doesn't address the lingering connection issue with the new testnet version -- my clients will connect sometimes, and not sometimes, and even that first time, the delay was quite long.
But sounds like progress
Hit me with any nodes you have, I'll add.
Note that my static IP node is in a previous post.