After installing it, start a cmd window and run "c:\path\to\bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe -rescan".

The coins don't have to arrive in your wallet.dat.  They just need to get listed in the public blockchain.

As long as you have a backup of your wallet.dat, you're fine.  Go ahead and update to the latest.

You can also download a recent blockchain here:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/blockchain/

However, make sure you run with -rescan the first time so it'll find your coins.

Edit: fixed URL

Waiting for confirmations isn't a network requirement.  It's just a trust issue.

You can automatically trust your own change.  You're not going to double-spend attack yourself, so there's no need to wait.

The "change" has no technical difference from the "payment".  It's just two outputs.  For example, consider these two transactions:

Address A has 1 BTC
You pay 0.75 BTC to B
You receive 0.25 BTC change to C

Address A has 1 BTC
You pay 0.75 BTC to B and 0.25 BTC to C
There is no change left over

The only difference is in the first, address C was automatically generated by your client; in the second, you entered it manually.  From a network and blockchain perspective these two transactions are identical, bit for bit.

For anyone who stumbles on this in the future: I wrote a simple brute force script which may work if you know most of your password.  Get it here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=85495.msg942171#msg942171

I want people to use open source solutions, but for-profit miners are going to use whatever works best for them.

This is one of many reasons that it's important to keep developing Litecoin and other alternative chains.

It will still affect your other applications.  By design, Litecoin is very memory intensive.  Even if it's only running on two cores it will consume the CPU cache (L1 cache will be OK if you set strict affinity, but L2 and L3 cache are shared across cores), and it will consume memory bandwidth (causing the L3 misses to stall the CPU even longer).  If your other application is a light load you may not care, but be sure to test.

Solo vs pooled is entirely your choice.  Do whichever is more fun for you.  

I recommend you do not misappropriate your employer's resources for your own profit.  It is both illegal and immoral.

If they are your own servers, sure, but there are downsides.  They will consume more electricity while working, and they will run slower (even if you run the process  with low priority) because it will be constantly exhausting the CPU cache.  If you're okay with that, sure, why not?

All right, now we're getting somewhere.

If you just want to get it running again, try this:

mv ~/.bitcoin ~/.bitcoin-old
mkdir ~/.bitcoin
cp ~/.bitcoin-old/wallet.dat ~/.bitcoin

Then restart the client.  It will download the blockchain again and then it should work.

If you want to dig deeper into why it failed we can, but that's harder.

Take a look at /home/seth/.bitcoin/db.log .  What's there?

tail -n 50 ~/.bitcoin/debug.log

bitcoind runs forever until you kill it.  What are you expecting it to do?

There is a checksum to prevent sending to a completely bogus address.

However, if you send to the wrong address, you lose your money.  If you send to the wrong address and you happen to know who it is, you can ask them to give your money back, but it's on their honor to actually do so.

Try reading this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake

Then I can answer any questions you have.

I reject your premise.  I know most people are paranoid about their banking logins, but in my opinion there actually isn't that much damage that can be done by getting access to my account.  It's very hard use a login to send money irrevocably and untraceably to someone else.  Any receiving account can be reported to the police and the recipient brought in for fraud.

BTC requires much more paranoid security.

As for your questions:

1. I have active accounts at several banks, credit unions and investment firms.  Most allow me to close and reopen tabs; none create a session which will persist across browser restarts.

2. They are all in the range 10m to 45m.

3. Yes.  I actively subvert their security (which I consider unnecessary) by using a password manager with auto-login.  However, I only do so from my own computers which are encrypted and auto-lock.  I never enter passwords on computers I don't control, but if I did, I would want a short session expiration.

4. Yes, because I don't consider a random banking web site to be "sensitive".  Getting money out is hard, so it's only a privacy concern for people physically commandeering their computer after they walk away - the data is too low value to be targeted by a widespread virus.  I would not recommend setting persistence as default, but having it as an option is fine and people who set it can reasonably be expected to log out when they're done.  I would not recommend persisting across browser restarts, however.  A Bitcoin-related site where theft is much more plausible deserves a more paranoid approach.

5. Yes, the countermeasures should be there by default, but in my opinion in most cases it's fine to have an option to disable them.

It uses the oldest and smallest coins available.  There is no way to select specific coins in the standard client, but you can with the coderr patch:
http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/patching-the-bitcoin-client-to-make-it-more-anonymous/

Everyone agrees.  It's a long-term goal to keep improving performance.

Try 0.0005 BTC.

You can also just save your wallet.dat.

If your goal is to just get started then you can just download a recent copy of the blockchain from here:

http://eu1.bitcoincharts.com/blockchain/