Did have the same problem, but fixed it by doing steps above in this topic.
" BTW, if anyone is having issues remember we have a temporary workaround for the IRC problem
http://dns.phstones.com/
this will give you 50 alive nodes on main chain to put into .conf file whenever you access the page.
If you notice your connections going down after doing this, then you have indeed staked off the chain and will need to delete the data files of PHS (keep wallet.dat and philosopherstone.conf, with nodes from above) then dl the good one to resync (which is fast if you use nodes above) "
It will run through the start up "indexing...etc" as soon as it switches to the wallet. It stops responding. I have the image of the wallet, but everything inside is blank. Not graphics what so ever. Just the frame. I already had the conf file set up. Bad zipfile possibly?