Despite all of the above, I did try grabbing a new block chain yet again. Actually, I copied my "good" block chain (from the system that successfully received the SX) over to the other system. The results were the same, so again the conclusion is that for some reason the Import button is "broken" on this other PC. That being the case, let me give a few details of the PCs.
That's the reason is not working, you cannot copy the good blockchain files because Vertcoin Qt-wallet has to scan every transaction in each block. So, you need to delete the blockchain data, and open the Qt wallet, and then lets the program downloads the blockchain by itself.
I don't get it. The first time (in preparing for this test), the block chain was downloaded from the Internet through the wallet (which only took a couple hours over a sluggish connection), and things didn't work. If I copy a known-good block chain from one PC to another, which files store the scanned transactions? Can't I just run vertcoin-qt.exe -rescan? And if not, what's the point of the -rescan parameter!?
But fine, I deleted the entire block chain so the only thing left in AppData/Roaming/Vertcoin is wallet.dat. I've restarted, and since this PC is on a faster connection I'm nearly done with the download. From here I will then create a backup of that folder, then copy it to two different PCs, and see if either one of those work with grabbing that Stealth Transaction....
And I'm done. I've got two PCs with the appropriate wallet.dat, one Win7 and one Win8. Now I hit import... and they both work. Seriously? WTF. Again, see the first statement: this was a clean (newly downloaded) block chain as of yesterday when I went to start the test. Or, I suppose I should clarify: Vertcoin was on the PC from a few months ago, and when I started it the entire block chain appeared to be downloaded from scratch (it started at block 0 and counted up to 114K+). If that didn't result in a clean block chain, I have no idea what the PC was doing.
For the record, I tried doing this same thing but with an existing block chain; in both cases (Win7 and Win8) the "Import" button didn't seem to do anything. Starting with the -rescan option caused the wallet to have a very long delay at startup with the message that it was rescanning (which was expected), but it didn't ever allow any of the systems to properly pick up the SX. I tried turning on UAC; no change in behavior. Ugh.
Best guess right now is that the original download of the block chain yesterday was somehow corrupted -- either there were some old files from an earlier version of Vertcoin or something else, so even with a supposed download things didn't work. The only way to truly fix the problem was to start fresh. Anyway, let me offer some other comments before I disappear from this thread for a while.
Why did the -rescan option not fix the problem right from the start? Isn't the whole purpose of -rescan intended to validate the current blockchain and scan for any transactions (Stealth or normal) related to the wallet? If it can't do that, then some other option needs to be put in place that will find and correct problems of this nature. The block chain that was copied over clearly worked for my second test, and a rescan should have been sufficient. Furthermore, if there was corruption in the initial block chain, it would have taken place more than three weeks back (block chain time) as I don't believe Vertcoin-qt had been running on the system for a month or more. Unfortunately all of the files related to the original issue have now been deleted, so I have no way to try to reproduce the error.
So first off, I'm still baffled that nothing was happening when I pressed "Import", and yet there was no feedback. These buttons need to have tool tips as well as some sort of feedback -- like the status bar could show a message saying "Importing SX [xxx] of [yyy]..." and show the progress of the import, and the reset button could display a note to the effect of "Import index reset to [qqq]."
Second, it seems that right now when you first scan for SX using the import button, it starts from block 0 and goes through the current block. This is a waste of time, of course, as no SX can exist prior to...block 114000? Whatever the first block is where SX and Stealth Addresses are supported. I'd suggest the Reset button also reset to the appropriate block and not block 0 -- unless of course you want to add a GUI interface for accomplishing the -rescan task. And if the import is actually only scanning from the past few weeks or whatever, this could be really painful on new wallets in six months where the initial scan might take 10 minutes or more. If they download from scratch, I suppose that's not a problem, but cryptocurrencies in general need to find a way to "fast sync" to the current block on a new wallet.
Anyway, I now have my 5.3+ VTC back, I'll update my blog, and good luck with Vertcoin. I'm surprised it hasn't done better, but the cryptocurrency world is a fickle mistress as I'm sure you're well aware. :-)
idiot scam, 200 mh in scrypt-n would be ok but 1Gh... 
