Try to answer but the system says I cannot post within 5 min.

Mine is slightly different, my wallet sync just fine, so I did not addnode manually. And I have maxconnection set to control connections to peers. That's it. 

One reminder is that, sometimes some wallet may not allow trigger windows firewall rule creation and you need to manually enable that if you cannot connect from another machine to your wallet but local connection works fine. I had such issue once.

As to ColorCoin, I only had 2 750Tis in solo mining, so far just has 1 block found.  I was late to the game when it was launched about 1 hour. And don't want to allocate too much resource.

I kinda like Quark algo mining after 0.9 release,  my miner processes seems more stable and less crashing (mainly because I may OC too much... sometimes it crashed say 10 hours later after I tuned OC settings).  I missed HVC much and hope they can recover... Summer is coming....