Deleting the vertcoins.vertspvchain file and then right clicking on the .vtcwallet file and choosing open and browsing to the vertigo.exe is the only thing that ever caused the wallet to synchronize and show the value. The initial wallet as set up out of the box never synchronized. Choosing Resynchronize from the tools menu looks like it doesn't do anything. Exporting and then importing the private key never synchronized. It just always showed a green dot and "Online" at the bottom and a 0 balance no matter what I did until I did what was posted in the reddit link earlier. That caused a very obvious re-sync where the dot turned yellow and it said resynchronizing for several minutes and then updated to show the value.

If you want to look at my log file I can send it to you. I skimmed through it but it is 24MB of text and the same release notes are scattered through it over and over again, so it was pretty hard to make any sense of without knowing what to look for to do a search.