What does the block count in the status bar at the bottom say? If this stays at 0 or below the block number your transaction is included in you won't see them.

Normally it should increase (although quite slowly) even if you don't have port 8333 forwarded (or opened in your firewall) to the computer your bc client runs on. And even if the bc client can't establish a connection to the irc network to find new nodes it comes with some build in nodes, that's were you get the 8 connections from, iirc.

If your block count stays at 0 it could be that you have no internet connection at all.