i still had to restart the clients twice, but now it seems to work and I have enabled 'listen' again, in hopes that the bad nodes won't come back to haunt us

The latest wallent ignores the bad nodes :-) It downloads blocks only from nodes which announces protocol version 60017 or greater.
But it wil push our blocks to them ;-) And then they will ban our nodes, thinking we are the bad guy.
That's why I'm a bit worried about that protocol 60018. But it won't hurt us, if it would, then it would be easy to cause havoc just by creating a node with big version number.
Actually that .conf file is essential only when you start your wallet first time. After that it will keep database about good nodes and will find them (unless you delete that file)
that's very clever set up, but I wasn't able to get the correct chain when listening and then I all of a sudden could download when configuring for not to listen. Off course I could have been more 'lucky' that last time, but then I was unlucky the 25 times before..

This is the Windows wallet, "1.0.1", was the changes implemented yet on that one?
it wont hurt us - BUT it assures that badnodes dont get overwhelming - good Thing i think