Since nothing else seemed to work, computer would just slow down and stop, whenever it would get around 100,000 blocks, so I tried downloading latest blockchain from
http://eu1.bitcoincharts.com/blockchain/.
Went to my bitcoins folder, and deleted everything but wallet.dat, and began extracting/opening the blockchain I'd downloaded to this folder...at 31% extracted, I got this message:
data error in "blk0001.dat". File is broken Happened several times. This was all done on same computer that's has been giving constant problems.
What I'm trying now, is:
1) Made copy of wallet.dat
2) Opened up debian(linux) computer, which is much faster.
3) Installed bitcoin, put original copy of wallet.dat in .bitcoin folder (Made sure, of course, bitcoin was off, and deleted anything but wallet.dat, then replaced wallet.dat with original version I'd copied here.
4) Started bitcoin app. It's zipping along nicely, within an hour or so I'm now at 111000 blocks. Only 8 connections, which at this point is alright...perhaps I need to open a port on the firewall, but I'll research up on that...this is first time using btc on linux, and I'm going thru my usual 'learning curve' confusion, but sfsg ....
--Any advice/criticism is welcome and appreciated...this is all over 25 btc, but I also like the learning I'm doing...