I've got literally 10's of wallets for different coins, so experience isn't the issue here.
Not only that, I installed the wallet on a different machine with no issues whatsoever - downloaded and synched within minutes.
The only difference I can think of - the wallet that's NOT working is the one without password.
The working wallet I tried was the password protected file.
the conf file isn't a text file (ie .txt), and I've tried running as Administrator - still, nothing.
:-(
We have both password protected and non protected wallet, they're still OK. Could you download the conf file in the first page then put to your wallet folder then try again and wait for some minutes. My friends take 1 hour to get an active network (that's really bad case). Normally, after few minutes you can get the connection.