How long should it take for a transaction to complete the confirmations. Is it required for my wallet to complete synchronization, or is that a separate function? I somehow thought that transactions were fairly immediate, a few seconds to complete. This has taken well over an hour and still not completed.
The transaction will generally be relayed through the network within a few seconds.
Depending on how many unconfirmed transactions are on the network, how many bytes were required to create your transaction, how soon the next miner finds the next block, and how large of a fee you included in your transaction, the first confirmation could occur within seconds, or it could be hours.
Once the transaction receives it's first confirmation, it will get additional confirmations at a rate of approximately 1 confirmation every 10 minutes. The process of generating additional confirmations is random and while it is throttled to average approximately 10 minutes, it is possible to have 2 confirmations almost immediately after each other, or several hours apart.
If you are running the Bitcoin-Qt wallet, you may want to consider a lightweight wallet like Electrum or Multibit, you might even want to consider a web hosted wallet such as blockchain.info. The confirmations will not show up in Bitcoin-Qt until the synchronization has caught up to the block that first confirmed the transaction. You can however see how many confirmations the transaction has received, by looking at the blockchain.info website. In the link below, replace the words YOUR_TRANSACTION_ID_HERE with the actual transaction ID from your transaction and the web page that it pulls up should tell you how many confirmations have occurred on the transaction so far:
http://blockchain.info/tx/YOUR_TRANSACTION_ID_HERE
