EDIT: Got it after adding over 25 nodes to my conf. I don't think this is healthy for the coin. My QT client still connects to a single connection for a split second then hops off.
This only happens to me on my Windows machines with OP's build. I compiled qt on an Ubuntu 12.10 box with upnp enabled and I was able to connect, and download the blockchain almost immediately. However, I did add several nodes to the .conf, and I only have a few machines running linux, so I don't know if I was just lucky. I had trouble getting the client to work on a few machines with OP's build.
hashespersec doesn't work yet. Is your CPU at around 100%? If you have genproclimit=-1 set, quarkcoind should be using about 100% of your CPU.